With the last I am less intimately acquainted; but I take her to be the same “lady” of whom the favourite son of Mrs. Merrythought sings, in the last act of “The Knight of the Burning Pestle.”
[114] It is almost superfluous to observe, that rosemary was supposed by our forefathers to be very efficacious in strengthening the retentive faculties; and, by being always borne at funerals, was calculated to perpetuate the remembrance of the deceased. “Here is a strange alteration: for, the rosemary that was washt in sweet water to set out the bridall, is now wet in teares to furnish her burial.”—Decker’s Wonderfull Yeare 1603.
[115] The belief that the turning of the cloak, or glove, or any garment, solved the benighted traveller from the spell of the Fairies, is alluded to in the Iter Boreale, (see p. 191,) and is still retained in some of the western counties.
[116] This poem, of which the leading features seem to be copied from the 10th epistle of the 1st book of Horace, has been printed in “The Antient and Modern Miscellany,” by Mr. Waldron, from a manuscript in his possession, and it is consequently retained in this edition of Corbet’s Poems; to whose acknowledged productions it bears no resemblance, at the same time that it is attributed (in Ashmole’s MSS., No. 38, fol. 91.) to Robert Heyrick, the author of “Hesperides.”
Discite quam parvo liceat producere vitam, Et quantum natura petat.
Impiger extremos currit mercator ad Indos, Per mare pauperiem fugiens, per saxa, per ignes.
[119] See Warton’s Hist. of Engl. Poetry, vol. iii. p. 170, 171.
[121] This poem, which is in some manuscripts attributed to William Stroude, has already been printed in the Topographer of my very intelligent friend, Samuel Egerton Brydges, esq. vol. ii. p. 112.
[122] Richard Greenham was educated at Pembroke-Hall in Cambridge, and became minister of Dry-Drayton, three miles distant; where it should seem, from a rhyming proverb, that his success in the ministry was not proportionate to his zeal:
Greenham had pastures green, But sheep full lean.
“What,” says Fuller (Church Hist. lib. ix. 220.), “was Dry-Drayton but a bushel to hide,—London an high candlestick to hold up the brightness of his parts?” Thither he repaired; and, after an ‘erratical and planetary life,’ settled himself at Christ-Church, where he ended his days in 1592.