I to the better sort my lines display,
I pray thee then keep thou thy selfe away.
(A Strappado for the Diuell, 1615.)
The sixth line offers another illustration of what has been ably demonstrated by J. O. Halliwell, commenting on the “too-too solid flesh” of Hamlet, Act i. sc. 2, in Shakespeare Soc. Papers, i. 39-43, 1844.
By it being printed within double quotational commas, we see that the reference to a Puritan hanging his cat on a Monday, for having profanely caught a mouse on the Sabbath-Sunday, was already an old and familiar joke in 1615. James Hogg garbled a ballad in his Jacobite Relics, 1819, i. 37, as “There was a Cameronian Cat, Was hunting for a prey,” &c., but we have a printed copy of it, dated 1749, beginning “A Presbyterian Cat sat watching of her prey.” Also, in a poem “On Lute-strings, Cat-eaten,” we read:—
Puss, I will curse thee, maist thou dwell
With some dry Hermit in a Cel,
Where Rat ne’re peep’d, where Mouse ne’er fed,
And Flies go supperlesse to bed:
Or with some close par’d Brother, where