[Footnote 1: of far reaching mind.]
[Footnote 2: The word windlaces is explained in the dictionaries as shifts, subtleties—but apparently on the sole authority of this passage. There must be a figure in windlesses, as well as in assaies of Bias, which is a phrase plain enough to bowlers: the trying of other directions than that of the jack, in the endeavour to come at one with the law of the bowl's bias. I find wanlass a term in hunting: it had to do with driving game to a given point—whether in part by getting to windward of it, I cannot tell. The word may come of the verb wind, from its meaning 'to manage by shifts or expedients': Barclay. As he has spoken of fishing, could the windlesses refer to any little instrument such as now used upon a fishing-rod? I do not think it. And how do the words windlesses and indirections come together? Was a windless some contrivance for determining how the wind blew? I bethink me that a thin withered straw is in Scotland called a windlestrae: perhaps such straws were thrown up to find out 'by indirection' the direction of the wind.
The press-reader sends me two valuable quotations, through Latham's edition of Johnson's Dictionary, from Dr. H. Hammond (1605-1660), in which windlass is used as a verb:—
'A skilful woodsman, by windlassing, presently gets a shoot, which, without taking a compass, and thereby a commodious stand, he could never have obtained.'
'She is not so much at leasure as to windlace, or use craft, to satisfy them.'
To windlace seems then to mean 'to steal along to leeward;' would it be absurd to suggest that, so-doing, the hunter laces the wind? Shakspere, with many another, I fancy, speaks of threading the night or the darkness.
Johnson explains the word in the text as 'A handle by which anything is turned.']
[Footnote 3: 'in your selfe.' may mean either 'through the insight afforded by your own feelings'; or 'in respect of yourself,' 'toward yourself.' I do not know which is intended.]
[Footnote 4: 1st Q. 'And bid him'.]
[Footnote 5: loose; undone.]