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14 Plays
II. 11. 3. Pythagoreans. Poet. iv. in. 132. So in Fletcher and Massmger,
The Lover's Progress, iv. iv (Folio 1679, p. 507), Alcidon, entering to
a company silent with grief, says •
111 News had wings, and hath got here before me.
All Pythagoreans ? not a word ?
4. Harpocrates. Sej. v. 414 n. He is shown with his club in a Pompeian
bronze, figured in Roux and Barrels Herculanum et Pompei, vi,
pp. 189-90.
14. taste the one halfe of my dagger. R. Greene, A Quip for an Vpstart
Courtier, 1592, Ei v , Veluet Breeches told a Serjeant, 'if he stird one foot
toward him, he would make him eate a peece of his poinard'.
17-27. The first of a series of imitations from Juvenal's sixth Satire,
28-32:
Certe sanus eras. Uxorem, Postume, ducis ?
Dic qua Tisiphone, quibus exagitere colubns.
Ferre potes dominam salvis tot restibus ullam,
cum pateant altae cahgantesque fenestrae,
cum tibi vicinum se praebeat Aemihus pons ?
22. at a low fall. The twenty arches of the bridge made the river at
this point a series of rapids, Truewit advises a plunge during the
ebb-tide.
23-4. such a delicate steeple ... as Bow. A square with four pinnacles
at the cornei s, and flying buttresses from these supporting a central
pinnacle. It was destroyed in the fire of 1666 (Wheatley and Cunningham,
London Past and Present).
25. Pauls. The 'brauer height' was the roof of the church; the
steeple was burned in 1561 and not replaced (Und. xlm. 193).
31. aflie. Harrison's Description of England, m, ch. vi (ed. Furmvall,
n, p. 39), describes fly and spider fights, patronized by coxcombs: 'But
if those lollie fellows in steed of the straw that they thrust into the flies
tale (a great iniurie no doubt to such a noble champion) would bestow
the cost to set a fooles cap vpon their owne heads, then might they
with more secuntie and lesse reprehension behold these notable battels/
35. preachings. The unauthorized variant 'parlee's', i.e. conferences,
appears to be a printer's blunder when the page was reset.
36-7. in king Ethelred's time, sir, or Edward the Confessors. Freely
adapted from Juvenal's suggestion in the opening lines of his sixth
Satire that Modesty lingered on earth in Saturn's reign, the golden age,
and left it soon after Jupiter succeeded him.
Credo Pudicitiam Saturno rege moratam
in terns visamque diu,
39-41. contented with one man. Juvenal, 53-4:
Unus Hiberinae vir sufficit ? Ocius illud
Extorquebis ut haec oculo contenta sit uno.