[471] Head.  See note to “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” [iii. 242].

[472] Shall never cease, stop, or leave of.  So in Ben Jonson’s “Staple of News,” Intermean after 4th act—­

    “He’ll never lin till he be a gallop.”

Mr Whalley proposes to read blin.  “The word,” says he, “is Saxon, and the substantive blin, derived from blinnan, occurs in the ’Sad Shepherd.’  Yet the word occurs in Drayton in the sense of stopping or staying, as it is used here by our poet—­

    “’Quoth Puck, my liege, I’ll never lin,
    Hut I will thorough thick and thin.’

“—­’Court of Fairy.’  So that an emendation may be unnecessary, and lin, the same as leave, might have been in common use.”

The latter conjecture is certainly right, many instances maybe produced.  As in “The Return from Parnassus,” act iv. sc. 3—­

    “Fond world, that ne’er think’st on that aged man,
    That Ariosto’s old swift-paced man,
    Whose name is Time, who never lins to run,
    Loaden with bundles of decayed names.”

In “A Chast Mayd in Cheapside,” by Middleton:  “You’ll never lin ’till I make your tutor whip you; you know how I serv’d you once at the free schoole in Paul’s Church Yard.”  And in, “More Dissemblers besides Women,” by the same, act iii. sc.  I:  “You nev’r lin railing on me, from one week’s end to another.” [Lin is common enough in the old romances.]

[473] See [Dyce’s “Middleton,” iii. 97, and] Note 20 to the “Match at Midnight.”—­Collier.

[474] This must have been addressed to the audience, and may be adduced as some slight evidence of the antiquity of the play, as in later times dramatists were not guilty of this impropriety.  The old morality of “The Disobedient Child” has several instances of the kind; thus, the son says to the spectators—­

    “See ye not, my maysters, my fathers advyse? 
    Have you the lyke at any time harde?”

Again, the Man-cook—­

    “Maysters, this woman did take such assaye,
    And then in those dayes so applyed her booke.”

—­Collier [ii. 276, 284].

[475] See Note 25 to “Ram Alley.”—­Collier. [In “Romeo and Juliet,” i. 3, the Nurse says, “Nay, I do bear a brain,” i.e., I do bear in mind, or recollect (Dyce’s edit. 1868, vi. 398).  Reed’s explanation, adopted by Dyce, seems hardly satisfactory.]

[476] See note to “Gammer Gorton’s Needle,” iii. 205.  Query, if the passages there quoted may not refer to this very character of Akercock and his dress, as described in act i. sc. 1.—­Collier. [Probably not, as this play can hardly have been in existence go early, and the character and costume of Robin Goodfellow were well understood, even before “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” was written.]

[477] So in “The Return from Parnassus,” act v. sc. 4—­