Hurd compares Cowley:
| "Beauty, and strength, and wit, and wealth, and power, Have their short flourishing hour; And love to see themselves, and smile, And joy in their pre-eminence a while: Even so in the same land Poor weeds, rich corn, gay flowers together stand; Alas! Death mows down all with an impartial hand." |
[35.] Awaits. The reading of the ed. of 1768, as of the Pembroke (and probably the other) MS. Hour is the subject, not the object, of the verb.
[36.] Hayley, in the Life of Crashaw, Biographia Britannica, says that this line is "literally translated from the Latin prose of Bartholinus in his Danish Antiquities."
[39.] Fretted. The fret is, strictly, an ornament used in classical architecture, formed by small fillets intersecting each other at right angles. Parker (Glossary of Architecture) derives the word from the Latin fretum, a strait; and Hales from ferrum, iron, through the Italian ferrata, an iron grating. It is more likely (see Stratmann and Wb.) from the A. S. frætu, an ornament.
Cf. Hamlet, ii. 2:
"This majestical roof fretted with golden fire;"
and Cymbeline, ii. 4:
| "The roof o' the chamber With golden cherubins is fretted." |