[P. 304]. “Our Princess doth.” This, vouched for by one such as Scot, shows the real piety and wisdom of Elizabeth as against the scandals of the then times and the beliefs of after times.
[P. 312]. “Black children.” I put this down either to looseness of writing or to that want of discrimination (or colour blindness) which led Elizabethans to speak of things as black, etc., which approached that colour. “As black as a toad.”
[P. 314]. “Two manner of todes.” An example of the universal belief that all insects, and some eels, serpents, and toads, were not begotten, but produced by the action of the sun on inanimate matters, in fact by spontaneous generation. Even the generation of man was held to require the co-operation of the sun.
——— “Of the fat of a man ... lice.” He means, I presume, of fat beneath the skin of a living person, a belief apparently confirmed by the death of persons from lice; for Bartholome, Batman’s alias Trevisa’s translation, says, l. 18, c. 88: “Lice and nits gender in the head or in the skinne”; and just before, they are engendered “of right corrupt air & vapoures that sweate out betweene the skinne and the flesh by pores.”
[P. 316]. “Aqua composita.” Not in Ovid’s sense, but, I presume = spirits of wine or rectified wine, etc., though I have not come across the term elsewhere. I may add that Aqua was used = Succus.
[P. 319]. “The cause being taken away.” See note, p. 14.
[P. 333]. “Nether card.” Scot evidently did not know “the pass”; possibly his age did not.
[P. 338]. “Gaggle of geese.” The then correct term for a flock of geese. Cf. The Boke of St. Albans, at the end of “Hawking”.
[P. 339]. “Send them to Pope.” Unable to refer “them” to the “horses” or to the “neighbors”, I am forced to believe it an error for “then”.
——— “Unto the doore.” This (.) should be (,) the “W” marking, as usual, the beginning of (the purport of) his speech.