In Sir J. Hawkins's edition is the following note on the word "Sardonic" in these lines:
"Feigned, or forced smiles, from the word Sardon, the name of an herb resembling smallage, and growing in Sardinia, which, being eaten by men, contracts the muscles, and excites laughter even to death. Vide Erasmi Adagia, tit. RISUS."
Sardonic, in this passage, means "forced, strained, unusual, artificial;" and is not taken in the worst sense. These lines of Sir H. Wotton's bring to mind some of Lorenzo de Medici's in a platonic poem of his, when he contrasts the court and country. I quote Mr. Roscoe's translation:—
"What the heart thinks, the tongue may here disclose,
Nor inward grief with outward smiles is drest;
Not like the world—where wisest he who knows
To hide the secret closest in his breast."
The Edinburgh Review, July, 1849, in an article on Tyndale's Sardinia, says:
"The Sardonic smile, so celebrated in antiquity, baffles research much more than the intemperie, nor have modern physiologists thrown any light on the nature of the deleterious plant which produces it. The tradition at least seems still to survive in the country, and Mr. Tyndale adduces some evidence to show that the Ranunculus sceleratus was the herb to which these exaggerated qualities were ascribed. Some insular antiquaries have found a different solution of the ancient proverb. The ancient Sardinians, they say, like many barbarous tribes, used to get rid of their relations in extreme old age by throwing them alive into deep pits; which attention it was the fashion for the venerable objects of it to receive with great expressions of delight: whence the saying of a Sardinian laugh (vulgo), laughing on the wrong side of ones mouth. It seems not impossible, that the phenomenon may have been a result of the effects of 'Intemperie' working on weak constitutions, and in circumstances favourable to physical depression—like the epidemic chorea, and similar complaints, of which such strange accounts are read in medical books."