9. It would seem that about this time the French were adopting their present mode of pronunciation, so capriciously distinct from the orthography.
10. "Queen Dido, or the wandering Prince of Troy," an old ballad, printed in the "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," in which the ghost of queen Dido thus addresses the perfidious Æneas:
Therefore prepare thy flitting soul, To wander with me in the air; When deadly grief shall make it howl, Because of me thou took'st no care. Delay not time, thy glass is run, Thy date is past, thy life is done.
11. _Pricking_, in hare-hunting, is tracking the foot of the game by the eye, when the scent is lost.]
12. The facetious Tom Brown, in his 2d dialogue on Mr Bayes' changing his religion, introduces our poet saying,
"Likewise he (Cleveland) having the misfortune to call that domestic animal a cock,
I could never, igad, as I came home from the tavern, meet a watchman or so, but I presently asked him, 'Baron Tell-clock of the night, pr'ythee how goes the time?"
13. Artemidorus, the sophist of Cnidos, was the soothsayer who prophesied the death of Cæsar. Shakespeare has introduced him in his tragedy of "Julius Cæsar."
14. A common rendezvous of the rakes and bullies of the time; "For when they expected the most polished hero in Nemours, I gave them a ruffian reeking from Whetstone's Park." Dedication to Lee's "Princess of Cleves." In his translation of Ovid's "Love Elegies," Lib. II, Eleg. XIX. Dryden mentions, "an easy Whetstone whore."
I beg a boon, that, ere you all disband, Some one would take my bargain off my hand: To keep a punk is but a common evil; To find her false, and marry,--that's the devil. Well, I ne'er acted part in all my life, But still I was fobbed off with some such wife. I find the trick; these poets take no pity Of one that is a member of the city. We cheat you lawfully, and in our trades; You cheat us basely with your common jades. Now I am married, I must sit down by it; But let me keep my dear-bought spouse in quiet. Let none of you damned Woodalls of the pit, Put in for shares to mend our breed in wit; We know your bastards from our flesh and blood, Not one in ten of yours e'er comes to good. In all the boys, their fathers' virtues shine, But all the female fry turn Pugs--like mine. When these grow up, Lord, with what rampant gadders Our counters will be thronged, and roads with padders! This town two bargains has, not worth one farthing,-- A Smithfield horse, and wife of Covent-Garden[1].