[22] Vertumnus enters at the same time, but his name is not mentioned in the old 4to at the opening of the scene.  He acts the part of a messenger, and, as appears afterwards, was provided with a silver arrow.

[23] Well-flogged.

[24] Hor. lib. i. car. 28—­

            “Sed omnibus una manet nox,
    Et calcanda semel via leti.”

[25] “The Queen in her summer progress passed through Oxford, and stayed there several days, where she was agreeably entertained with elegant speeches, plays, and disputations, and received a splendid treat from the Lord Buckhurst, Chancellor of the University.”—­Camden’s “Annals of Elizabeth.”  Her progress is again alluded to in that part of the play where Summer makes his will—­

“And finally, O words, now cleanse your course,
Unto Eliza, that most sacred dame,
Whom none but saints and angels ought to name,
All my fair days remaining I bequeath,
To wait upon her, till she be return’d,” &c.

[26] The following passage in Gabriel Harvey’s “New Letter of Notable Contents, 1593,” speaking of Nash, confirms the conjecture that Falantado or Falanta was the burden of a song or ballad at the time:—­“Let him be the Falanta down-diddle of rhyme, the hayhohaliday of prose, the welladay of new writers, and the cutthroat of his adversaries.”

[27] The hobby-horse was a basket-horse used in morris-dances and May games.  See note 37 to Greene’s “Tu Quoque.”

[28] [Hall, the taborer, mentioned in “Old Meg of Herefordshire,” 1609.  See the reprint in “Miscellanea Antiqua Anglicana,” 1816.]

[29] A vulgar colloquialism for laying a girl on the grass.

[30] He ran in debt to this amount to usurers, who advanced him money by giving him lute-strings and grey paper; which he was obliged to sell at an enormous loss.  There is a very apposite passage in Nash’s “Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem,” 1593, where he is referring to the resort of spendthrifts and prodigals to usurers for supplies:  In the first instance, they obtain what they desire, “but at the second time of their coming, it is doubtful to say whether they shall have money or no:  the world grows hard, and we are all mortal:  let them make him any assurance before a judge, and they shall have some hundred pounds (per consequence) in silks and velvets.  The third time if they come, they have baser commodities:  the fourth time lute-strings and grey paper; and then, I pray pardon me, I am not for you:  pay me that you owe me, and you shall have anything.”

So also in Greene’s and Lodge’s “Looking Glass for London and England,” 1594, a gentleman thus addresses a usurer, in hopes of inducing him to relent:  “I pray you, sir, consider that my loss was great by the commodity I took up:  you know, sir, I borrowed of you forty pounds, whereof I had ten pounds in money, and thirty pounds in lute-strings, which when I came to sell again, I could get but five pounds for them.”