[93] From the insertion of Toy in this song instead of Mingo, as it stands on the entrance of Bacchus and his companions, we are led to infer that the name of the actor who played the part of Will Summer was Toy:  if not, there is no meaning in the change.  Again, at the end of the piece, the epilogue says in express terms:  “The great fool Toy hath marred the play,” to which Will Summers replies, “Is’t true, Jackanapes?  Do you serve me so?” &c.  Excepting by supposing that there was an actor of this name, it is not very easy to explain the following expressions by Gabriel Harvey, as applied to Greene, in his “Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, 1592,” the year when Nash’s “Summer’s Last Will and Testament” was performed:  “They wrong him much with their epitaphs and solemn devices, that entitle him not at the least the second Toy of London, the stale of Paul’s,” &c.

[94] Nipitaty seems to have been a cant term for a certain wine.  Thus Gabriel Harvey, in “Pierce’s Supererogation,” 1593, speaks of “the Nipitaty of the nappiest grape;” and afterwards he says, “Nipitaty will not be tied to a post,” in reference to the unconfined tongues of man who drink it.—­Collier.

[95] A passage quoted in Note 6 to “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” from Nash’s “Pierce Penniless,” is precisely in point, both in explaining the word, and knocking the cup, can, or jack on the thumb-nail, previously performed by Bacchus.

[96] Closely is secretly:  a very common application of the word in our old writers.  It is found in “Albumazar”—­

    “I’ll entertain him here:  meanwhile steal you
    Closely into the room;”

and in many other places.

[97] Old copy, Hope.

[98] Old copy, as this, like.

[99] Old copy, Will.

[100] The “shepherd that now sleeps in skies” is Sir Philip Sidney, and the line, with a slight inversion for the sake of the rhyme, is taken from a sonnet in “Astrophel and Stella,” appended to the “Arcadia”—­

      “Because I breathe not love to every one,
      Nor do I use set colours for to wear,
      Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair,
    Nor give each speech a full point of a groan,
    The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan
      Of them who in their lips love’s standard bear,
      ‘What he?’ say they of me, ’now I dare swear
    He cannot love:  no, no; let him alone.’ 
    And think so still, so Stella know my mind: 
      Profess, indeed, I do not Cupid’s art;
    But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find,
      That his right badge is but worn in the heart. 
    Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove: 
    They love indeed who quake to say they love.”

—­P. 537, edit. 1598.

It may be worth a remark that the two last lines are quoted with a difference in “England’s Parnassus,” 1600, p. 191—­