’Nella fidelta,
    Finiro la Belta.

This does not seem to me very excellent Italian, but we need not suppose the author was necessarily a good scholar; and in that case we might extract from it the fairly good sense:  ’I will make fidelity the end (the accomplishment) of beauty.’” This explanation seems to me very satisfactory.

["‘La Bussa’ suits my explanation as well as, if not better than ’La Buffa.’  The meaning now is, ’I will end my task faithfully, with an equivoque on ’I will end La Busse, or the play containing him as a character, faithfully.’  There is no shadow of reason for supposing a rhyme, or for Field’s thinking that any reader would interpret La B. by la belta.  Moreover no other name but Field’s out of the 200 known names of dramatic writers anterior to 1640, can be found in the letters.  There are other works of Field than those commonly attributed to him still extant, as will be seen in a forthcoming paper of mine.”  —­F.G.  FLEAY.]

[82] So the MS., but I suspect that we should read “ruyne,” which gives better sense and better metre.

[83] The next line, as in many instances, has been cut away at the foot of the page.

[84] “The close contriver of all harms.”—­Macbeth, iii. 5.

[85] “The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
      And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.”—­Hamlet, i. 5.

[86] “Blacke and blewe,” i.e., first as a kitchen-drudge and afterwards as a personal attendant.  Blue was the livery of serving-men.

[87] It is not always easy to distinguish between final “s” and “e” in the MS. I printed “blesseing_e_” in the Appendix to vol.  II.

[88] Devices on shields.

[89] A baser sort of hawk (kestrel).

[90] A word before or after “thys” seems wanted to complete the line:  “yet, Richard, thys;” or, “yet thys disgrace.”

[91] Gervase Markham in the Second Part (cap. vi.) of the “English Husbandman” gives the following explanation of the term plashing.—­“This plashing is a halfe cutting or deviding of the quicke growth, almost to the outward barke, and then laying it orderly in a sloape manner, as you see a cunning hedger lay a dead hedge, and then with the smaller and more plyant branches to wreathe and binde in the tops, making a fence as strong as a wall, for the root which is more then halfe cut in sunder, putting forth new branches which runne and entangle themselves amongst the old stockes, doe so thicken and fortifie the Hedge that it is against the force of beasts impregnable” (ed. 1635, pp. 68-9).

[92] The first five lines of this speech are crossed through in the MS.

[93] In the MS. “reverend prelats” is crossed out and “preists” written above.  To make sure that the correction was understood, the author or reviser has written in the left-hand margin, “read preists.”