And after this most bad pretence,
       The gentleman each day
     Still felt his heart to throb and faint,
       And sad he was alway.

     His sleep was full of dreadful dreams,
       In bed where he did lie;
     His heart was heavy in the day,
       Yet knew no reason why.

     And oft as he did sit at meat,
       His nose most suddenly
     Would spring and gush out crimson blood,
       And straight it would be dry.

7.  There is great art in rendering the interpretation of this ominous
   dream so ingeniously doubtful.  The latter circumstance, where the
   Emperor recognises his murderer as a personage in his vision, seems
   to be borrowed from the story of one of the caliphs, who, before
   his death, dreamed, that a sable hand and arm shook over his head a
   handful of red earth, and denounced, that such was the colour of
   the earth on which he should die.  When taken ill on an expedition,
   he desired to know the colour of the earth on which his tent was
   pitched.  A negro slave presented him with a specimen; and in the
   black’s outstretched arm, bared, from respect, to the elbow, as
   well as in the colour of the earth, the caliph acknowledged the
   apparition he had seen in his sleep, and prepared for immediate
   death.

8. Et quum fata volunt, bina venena juvant.—­AUSONIUS.

9.  Idiots were anciently wards of the crown; and the custody of their
   person, and charge of their estate, was often granted to the suit
   of some favourite, where the extent of the latter rendered it an
   object of plunder.  Hence the common phrase of being begged for a
   fool.

10.  This incident seems to be taken from the following passage in the
   Continuation of the Adventures of Don Sebastian.

“In Moran, an island some half league from Venice, there is an abbot called Capelo, a gentleman of Venice, a grave personage, and of great authority, hearing that the king laid wait for certain jewels that he had lost, (hoping thereby to recover some of them,) having a diamond in his keeping with the arms of Portugal, came to the town to the conventicles of St Francis, called Frari, where the king lay concealed, for that he was pursued by some that meant him no good, who no sooner beheld the ring, but he said, ’Verily this is mine, and I either lost the same in Flanders, or else it was stolen from me.’  And when the king had put it upon his finger, it appeared otherwise engraven than before.  The abbot enquiring of him that brought him the ring, how he came by it? he answered, it is true that the king hath said.  Hence arose a strange rumour of a ring, that, by turning the stone, you might discern three great letters engraven, S.R.P. as much as to say, Sebastianus Rex Portugallix.”—­Harl.  Mis. vol. v. p. 462.