Sir John Suckling (baptized Feb. 10, 1609, and supposed to have died by suicide at Paris about 1642) was a Royalist poet in the Court of Charles I. He wrote some plays, but is best known by his minor poems, one of the most noted of which is the Ballad upon a Wedding.
Page 174.—Izaak Walton (1593–1683) is famous as the author of The Complete Angler (1653), one of the classics of our literature. He also wrote Lives of Donne, Hooker, Herbert, and other English divines.
Richard Hooker (1553?-1600) was a celebrated theologian, author of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, four books of which appeared in 1592, a fifth in 1597, and the remaining three after his death.
Page 180.—Warner's Albion's England. William Warner (1558?-1609) was the author of Albion's England (1586), a rhymed history of the country, and the translator of the Menæchmi of the Latin dramatist Plautus (1595), on which Shakespeare founded the plot of the Comedy of Errors.
Page 182.—Watchet-colored. Light blue. Compare Spenser, F. Q. iii. 4. 40: "Their watchet mantles frindgd with silver rownd."
Like a wild Morisco. That is, a morris-dancer. The quotation is from 2 Henry VI. iii. 1. 365:—
"I have seen
Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,
Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells."
Page 183.—The featliest of dancers. The most dexterous. Compare The Winter's Tale, iv. 4. 176: "She dances featly"; and The Tempest, i. 2. 380: "Foot it featly," etc.