“As Ynkehorne termes smell of the schoole sometyme.”

It went out of use with the disuse of ink-horns.  It would be very easy to multiply instances where the word is employed in our old writers.  It most frequently occurs in Wilson’s “Rhetoric,” where is inserted an epistle composed of ink-horn terms; “suche a letter as Wylliam Sommer himself could not make a better for that purpose.  Some will thinke, and swere it too, that there never was any suche thing written:  well, I will not force any man to beleve it, but I will saie thus much, and abyde by it too, the like have been made heretofore, and praised above the moone.”  It opens thus—­

“Ponderying, expendying, and revolutying with myself, your urgent affabilitee, and ingenious capacitee, for mundaine affaires, I cannot but celebrate and extolle your magnificall dexteritee above all other; for how could you have adopted such illustrate, prerogative, and dominicall superioritee, if the fecunditee of your inginie had not been so fertile and wonderfull pregnant?”—­Fo. 86. edit. 1553.  Wilson elsewhere calls them “ink-pot terms.”

[114] [The popular idea at that time, and long afterwards, of Machiavelli, arising from a misconception of his drift in “Il Principe.”  See an article on this subject in Macaulay’s “Essays.”]

[115] [Old copy, toucheth, which may, of course, be right; but the more probable word is that here substituted.]

[116] [The “Ebrietatis Encomium.”]

[117] [Perhaps the “Image of Idleness,” of which there was an edition in 1581.  See Hazlitt’s “Handbook,” p. 291, and ibid.  Suppl.]

[118] Nash alludes to a celebrated burlesque poem by Francisco Copetta, entitled (in the old collection of productions of the kind, made in 1548, and many times afterwards reprinted), “Capitolo nel quale si lodano le Noncovelle.”  Some of the thoughts in Rochester’s well-known piece seem taken from it.  A notion of the whole may be formed from the following translation of four of the terze rime—­

    “Nothing is brother to primaeval matter,
    ’Bout which philosophers their brains may batter
    To find it out, but still their hopes they flatter.

    “Its virtue is most wondrously display’d,
    For in the Bible, we all know, ’tis said,
    God out of nothing the creation made.

    “Yet nothing has nor head, tail, back, nor shoulder,
    And tho’ than the great Dixit it is older,
    Its strength is such, that all things first shall moulder.

    “The rank of nothing we from this may see: 
    The mighty Roman once declared that he
    Caesar or nothing was resolv’d to be.”

[But after all, had not Nash more probably in his recollection Sir Edward Dyer’s “Praise of Nothing,” a prose tract printed in 1585?]

[119] [See Hazlitt’s “Handbook,” v.  Fleming.]