In Heywood’s “Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas,” 1637, he complains that some persons by stenography had drawn the plot of his play, and put it into print; but he adds (which certainly does not tell much in favour of the perfection of the art as then practised) that it was “scarce one word true.”

[59] In the margin opposite “Sol should have been beholding to the barber, and not to the beard-master,” the words “Imberbis Apollo, a beardless poet,” are inserted in the margin.

[60] From what is said here, and in other parts of the play, we may conclude that it was performed either by the children of St Paul’s, of the Queen’s Chapel, or of the Revels.  Afterwards Will Summer, addressing the performers, says to them:  “Learn of him, you diminutive urchins, how to behave yourselves in your vocations,” &c.  The epilogue is spoken by a little boy, who sits on Will Summer’s knee, and who, after it is delivered, is carried out.

[61] [See Keightley’s “Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy,” p. 411, edit. 1854.]

[62] [In allusion to the proverb.]

[63] Arre is meant to indicate the snarling of a dog.

[64] So Machiavelli, in his complete poem, “Dell’ Asino d’Oro,” makes the Hog, who is maintaining the superiority of the brute creation to man, say of beasts in general—­

    “Questa san meglior usar color che sanno
    Senz’ altra disciplina per se stesso
    Seguir lor bene et evitar lor danno.”—­Cap. viii.

[65] [Old copy, I, and his deep insight.]

[66] An allusion to Sebastian Brandt’s “Ship of Fools,” translated by Alexander Barclay.

[67] So in “the second three-man’s song,” prefixed to Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” 1600, though in one case the bowl was black, in the other brown—­

    “Trowl the bowl, the jolly nut-brown bowl;
      And here, kind mate, to thee! 
    Let’s sing a dirge for Saint Hugh’s soul,
      And drown it merrily_.”

It seems probable that this was a harvest-home song, usually sung by reapers in the country:  the chorus or burden, “Hooky, hooky,” &c. is still heard in some parts of the kingdom, with this variation—­

    “Hooky, hooky, we have shorn,
    And bound what we did reap,
    And we have brought the harvest home,
    To make bread good and cheap.”

Which is an improvement, inasmuch as harvests are not brought home to town.

[68] Shakespeare has sufficiently shown this in the character of Francis, the drawer, in “Henry IV.  Part I.”

[69] [A play on the double meaning of the word].

[70] In the original copy this negative is by some accident thrust into the next line, so as to destroy at once the metre and the meaning.  It is still too much in the first line.

[71] This expression must allude to the dress of Harvest, which has many ears of wheat about it in various parts.  Will Summer, after Harvest goes out, calls him, on this account, “a bundle of straw,” and speaks of his “thatched suit.”