[107] "Whisht" (more commonly "whist") = hushed, stilled. Cf. Milton, Ode on the Nativity:—
"The winds with wonder whist
Smoothly the waters kist."
[108] "Plancher" (Fr. planche) = a plank. Cf. Arden of Feversham, I. i. "Whilst on the planchers pants his weary body," Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, iv. 1) has "a planched gate."
[109] "Incontinent" = immediately. The expression is very common (Richard II., v. 6, &c.).
[110] These verses and Frisco's "Can you blow the little horne"? are evidently fragments of Old Ballads—to be recovered, let us hope, hereafter.
[111] These four lines are from the old ballad of Fortune my foe, which will be found printed entire in the Bagford Ballads (Ed. J.W. Ebsworth, part iv. pp. 962-3); the music is given in Mr. W. Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time, I. 162. Mr. Ebsworth writes me:— "I have ascertained (assuredly) that what I at first thought to be a reference to 'Fortune my foe' in the Stationers' Registers, 1565-66, entered to John Charlewood (Arber's Transcripts, l. 310), as 'of one complaining of ye mutabilitie of Fortune' is not 'Fortune my foe,' but one of Lempill's ballads, printed by R. Lekpriwicke (sic), and still extant in the Huth Collections—the true title being 'Ane Complaint vpon Fortoun;' beginning 'Inconstant world, fragill and friuolus.'"
[112] Nares quotes from Chapman's May Day, "Lord, how you roll in your rope-ripe terms." Minshew explains the word as "one ripe for a rope, or for whom the gallows groans." I find the expression "to rowle in their ropripe termes" in William Bullein's rare and curious "Dialogue both pleasaunt and pietiful," 1573, p. 116.
[113] A very common term for a pimp.
[114] "Bale of dice"—a pair of dice; the expression occurs in the New Inn, I. 3, &c.
[115] This song is set to music in an old collection by Ravenscroft, 1614.