[97] Old copy, Hope.
[98] Old copy, as this, like.
[99] Old copy, Will.
[100] The "shepherd that now sleeps in skies" is Sir Philip Sidney, and the line, with a slight inversion for the sake of the rhyme, is taken from a sonnet in "Astrophel and Stella," appended to the "Arcadia"—
"Because I breathe not love to every one,
Nor do I use set colours for to wear,
Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair,
Nor give each speech a full point of a groan,
The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan
Of them who in their lips love's standard bear,
'What he?' say they of me, 'now I dare swear
He cannot love: no, no; let him alone.'
And think so still, so Stella know my mind:
Profess, indeed, I do not Cupid's art;
But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find,
That his right badge is but worn in the heart.
Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove:
They love indeed who quake to say they love."
—P. 537, edit. 1598.
It may be worth a remark that the two last lines are quoted with a difference in "England's Parnassus," 1600, p. 191—
"Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove;
They love indeed who dare not say they love."
In the quarto copy of Nash's play the word swains is misprinted for swans. The introduction to the passage would have afforded Mr Malone another instance, had he wanted one, that shepherd and poet were used almost as synonymes by Shakespeare's contemporaries.
[101] Perhaps we ought to read feign instead of frame; but frame is very intelligible, and it has therefore not been altered.