ANNO ÆT. SUÆ 74, DOM. 1599, DECEMB. 16; GLORIA DP. DF. ET DSS. AMOR VERSUS VIRGINEM REGINAM! PROTESTANTICE LOQUOR ET HONESTO SENSU: OBTESTOR CONSCIENTIAM MEAM!
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{ 8b} Debtors were often let out of prison at the coronation of a new king; but creditors never paid by him.
{ 21a} The word here omitted is quite illegible. It appears to have some reference to the language of the Highlanders. That it was rough and outlandish is apparent from the reprimand of Sir Thomas.
{ 29a} By this deposition it would appear that Shakspeare had formed the idea, if not the outline, of several plays already, much as he altered them, no doubt, in after life.
{ 38a} The greater part of the value of the present work arises from the certain information it affords us on the price of small needles in the reign of Elizabeth. Fine needles in her days were made only at Liege, and some few cities in the Netherlands, and may be reckoned among those things which were much dearer than they are now.
{ 39b} Mr. Tooke had not yet published his _Pantheon_.
{ 44a} This was really the case within our memory.
{ 45a} It was formerly thought, and perhaps is thought still, that the hand of a man recently hanged, being rubbed on the tumour of the king’s evil, was able to cure it. The crown and the gallows divided the glory of the sovereign remedy.
{ 46a} And yet he never did sail any farther than into Bohemia.
{ 50a} _Smock_, formerly a part of the female dress, corresponding with _shroud_, or what we now call (or lately called) _shirt_ of the man’s. Fox, speaking of Latimer’s burning, says, “Being slipped into his _shroud_.”
{ 50b} Faith nailing the ears is a strong and sacred metaphor. The rhyme is imperfect,—Shakspeare was not always attentive to these minor beauties.
{ 53a} Shakspeare seems to have profited afterward by this metaphor, even more perhaps than by all the direct pieces of instruction in poetry given him so handsomely by the worthy knight. And here it may be permitted the editor to profit also by the manuscript, correcting in Shakspeare what is absolute nonsense as now printed:—
“_Vaulting_ ambition that o’erleaps _itself_.”
It should be its _sell_. _Sell_ is _saddle_ in Spenser and elsewhere, from the Latin and Italian.