The friendless bodies of unburied men;"[396:A]
and the third in one of his pamphlets printed in 1616—"They that cheere up a prisoner but with their sight, are Robin red-breasts that bring strawes in their bils to cover a dead man in extremitie."[396:B]
Some wonderful properties relative to an imaginary gem, called a carbuncle, formed likewise a part of the popular creed. It was supposed to be the most transparent of all the precious stones, and to possess a native intrinsic lustre so powerful as to illuminate the atmosphere to a considerable distance around it. It was, therefore, very appositely adopted by the writers of romance, as an ornament and source of light for their subterranean palaces, and almost all our elder poets have gifted it with a similar brilliancy; thus Chaucer, in his Romaunt of the Rose[396:C]; Gower, in his Confessio Amantis[396:D]; Lydgate, in his Description of King Priam's Palace[396:E]; and Stephen Hawes, in his Pastime of Pleasure[396:F], have all celebrated it as a kind of second sun, and the most valuable of earthly products. Chaucer, more particularly, mentions it as so clear and bright,—
"That al so sone as it was night,
Men mightin sene to go for nede
A mile, or two in length and brede,
Such light ysprange out of that stone."
That this fiction was credited in the days of Elizabeth and James, may be conceded, not only from the familiar allusions of the poets, but from the philosophic writers on the superstitions of the age.
To the unborrowed light of the carbuncle, Shakspeare has referred in King Henry the Eighth, where the Princess Elizabeth is prophetically termed,
—————— "a gem