Face. Your jack, and all, sir.
Mammon. Slave, I could bite thine ear.... Away, thou dost not care for me!”
Gifford, in his notes on Jonson’s “Works” (vol. ii. p. 184), says the odd mode of expressing pleasure by biting the ear seems “to be taken from the practice of animals, who, in a playful mood, bite each other’s ears.”
While speaking of the ear, it may be noted that the so-called want of ear for music has been regarded as a sign of an austere disposition. Thus Cæsar says of Cassius (“Julius Cæsar,” i. 2):
“He hears no music
Seldom he smiles.”
There is, too, the well-known passage in the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1):
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
According to the Italian proverb: “Whom God loves not, that man loves not music.”[907]
Elbow. According to a popular belief, the itching of the elbow denoted an approaching change of some kind or other.[908] Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (v. 1), the king speaks of
“Fickle changelings, and poor discontents,
Which gape, and rub the elbow, at the news
Of hurlyburly innovation.”