Line of an author, whose name I cannot at this time recollect.—Steevens.
[91] A Dottrel is a silly kind of bird which imitates the actions of the fowler, till at last he is taken. If the fowler stretches out a leg, the bird will do so to. So, in Butler’s “Character of a Fantastic (Remains, vol. ii., p. 132)”: “He alters his gate with the times, and has not a motion of his body that (like a Dottrel) he does not borrow from somebody else.” See also Jonson’s “Devil is an Ass,” iv., 6, and Dyce’s “Beaumont and Fletcher,” iii., 79, and v., 64.
[92] [Original here has Cobex epi. Colliers used to be nick-named Carry-coals. See Hazlitt’s “Proverbs,” p. 98.]
[93] [Do up, open.]
[94] [For the supply of the court, or Bouche de la cour.]
[95] It was you, first edition.
[96] Doth, second edition.
[97] i.e., A cast of that species of hawks that were called Merlins.—Steevens. He calls them [merlins, which he might perhaps have been supposed to pronounce] Murlons on account of their size. Merlins were the smallest species of hawks. Turbervile says, “These merlyns are very much like the haggart falcon in plume, in seare of the foote, in beake and talons. So as there seemeth to be no oddes or difference at al betwixt them save only in the bignesse, for she hath like demeanure, like plume, and very like conditions to the falcon, and in hir kind is of like courage, and therefore must be kept as choycely and as daintly as the falcon.” The merlin was chiefly used to fly at small birds; and Latham says, it was particularly appropriated to the service of ladies.
[98] Father Grimme, second edition.
[99] [Something seems to have dropped out of the text here to this purport.]