[148] After three centuries we have not yet plucked up courage to spell this pet phrase of the bill-of-fare writers as an English word. Entry, as a tangible object, means something between, and not at the beginning; and if we contract entremets there is no reason why we should for ever talk French and say entrée, and use superfluous signs, meaningless to English eyes.—W.
[149] [Cut.]
“I am an English man and naked I stand here,
Musying in my mynde what rayment I shall were;
For now I will were thys, and now I will were that;
Now I will were I cannot tell what.
All new fashyons be plesaunt to me;
I wyl haue them, whether I thryve or thee.”
From Andrew Boorde’s Introduction (1541), and Dyetary (1542), edited by F. J. F. for Early English Text Society, 1870, p. 116. (A most quaint and interesting volume, though I say so.).—F.
[150] This is too harsh a character for Boorde; for a juster one, as I hope, see my preface to his Introduction, p. 105.—F.
[151] Almaine; see Halle, pp. 516-527.—F.
[152] There is no reason to suppose that Collyweston was ever in general English use. It is a Cheshire side-hit (and not common there), and all the Cheshire students cannot unravel the mystery. I have no doubt it belongs to one of the great baronial family of Weston, who were geniuses, and therefore of course “to madness near allied,” wits and cloaks awry.—W. [Weston Colvil is eleven miles from Cambridge, north of the Gogmagog Hills.—F.]
[153] See Wynkin de Worde’s Treatise of this Galaunt (? about 1520 A.D.) in my Ballads from Manuscripts (1520-54), vol. i., pp. 438-453 (Ballad Society, 1868 and 1872), a satire on the gallant or vicious dandy of the day.—F.
[154] Of the many of Shakespeare’s happiest hits which can be traced to Harrison’s fertile suggestion, this is one of the most apparent. Who can fail to appreciate that Petruchio’s side-splitting bout with the tailor had its first hint here?—W.
[155] Shakespeare complains of women painting their faces, and wearing sham-hair, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii., and the locks from “the skull that bred them in the sepulchre,” in Merchant, III. ii.—F.