“Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove;
    They love indeed who dare not say they love.”

In the quarto copy of Nash’s play the word swains is misprinted for swans.  The introduction to the passage would have afforded Mr Malone another instance, had he wanted one, that shepherd and poet were used almost as synonymes by Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

[101] Perhaps we ought to read feign instead of frame; but frame is very intelligible, and it has therefore not been altered.

[102] The quarto gives this line thus—­

    “Of secrets more desirous or than men,”

which is decidedly an error of the press.

[103] [Old copy, every.]

[104] [Old copy, true hell.]

[105] See act i. sc. 3 of “Macbeth”—­

    2D WITCH.  I’ll give thee a wind.

    1ST WITCH.  Thou art kind.

    3D WITCH.  And I another.

From the passage in Nash’s play, it seems that Irish and Danish witches could sell winds:  Macbeth’s witches were Scotish.

[106] [Old copy, party.]

[107] [Old copy, Form’d.]

[108] As usual, Nash has here misquoted, or the printer has omitted a word.  Virgil’s line is—­

    “Fama malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum.”

—­“Aeneid,” iv. 174.

Gabriel Harvey, replying in 1597, in his “Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman” (written in the name of Richard Litchfield, the barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge), also alludes to this commonplace:  “The virtuous riches wherewith (as broad-spread fame reporteth) you are endued, though fama malum (as saith the poet) which I confirm,” &c.  Perhaps this was because Nash had previously employed it, or it might be supposed that the barber would have been unacquainted with it.

[109] A soldier of this sort, or one pretending to be a soldier, is a character often met with in our old comedies, such as Lieutenant Maweworm and Ancient Hautboy in “A Mad World, my Masters,” Captain Face in “Ram-Alley,” &c.

[110] [Dii minores.]

[111] Pedlar’s French was another name for the cant language used by vagabonds.  What pedlars were may be judged from the following description of them in “The Pedlar’s Prophecy,” a comedy printed in 1595, but obviously written either very early in the reign of Elizabeth, or perhaps even in that of her sister—­

    “I never knew honest man of this occupation. 
    But either he was a dycer, a drunkard, a maker of shift,
    A picker, or cut-purse, a raiser of simulation,
    Or such a one as run away with another man’s wife.”

[112] [Old copy, by.]

[113] Ink-horn is a very common epithet of contempt for pedantic and affected expressions.  The following, from Churchyard’s “Choice,” sig.  E e 1., sets it in its true light—­