[305] Mr Reed allowed this line to stand—
"Whom all intelligence have drown'd this three months."
The restoration of the true reading also restores the grammar of the passage.—Collier.
[306] The same thought occurs in Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost," act iv. sc. 3—
"O me! with what strict patience have I sat,
To see a king transformed to a knot!"
[307] Mr Steevens, in his note to "King Richard III.," act v. sc. 3, observes there was anciently a particular kind of candle, called a watch because, being marked out into sections, each of which was a certain portion of time in burning, it supplied the place of the more modern instrument by which we measure the hours. He also says these candles are represented with great nicety in some of the pictures of Albert Durer.
[308] These words, as here printed, may be the pure language of falconry, like bate, which follows, and signifies to flutter. Yet I suspect that for brail we should read berail, and for hud us, hood us.
[309] Latham calls it bat, and explains it to be "when a hawke fluttereth with her wings, either from the pearch, or the man's fist, striving, as it were, to flie away or get libertie."
[310] "Heirlooms are such goods and personal chattels as, contrary to the nature of chattels, shall go by special custom to the heir, along with the inheritance, and not to the executor of the last proprietor. The termination, loom, is of Saxon original, in which language it signifies a limb or member of the inheritance."—Blackstone's "Commentaries," ii. 427.
[311] In act i. sc. 7, he says that it cost two hundred pounds.