SOURCE: Swinburne, A. C. “John Day.” In Contemporaries of Shakespeare, pp. 213-32. London: William Heinemann, 1919.

[In the excerpt below, Swinburne evaluates Day's talent as reflected in his poems and plays, concluding that Day's moderate genius was likely better suited to light verse than drama.]

One of the very greatest poets that ever glorified the world has left on record his wish that Beaumont and Fletcher had written poems instead of plays; and his wish has been echoed by one of the finest and surest critics of poetry, himself an admirable and memorable poet, unequalled in his own line of terse and pathetic narrative or allegory. I am reluctant if not ashamed, and sorry if not afraid, to differ from Coleridge and Leigh Hunt; yet I cannot but think that it would have been a pity, a mistake, and a grievous loss to poetic or creative literature if the great twin brethren of our drama had not given their whole soul and their whole strength to the stage. I cannot imagine that any poetry they might have left us, had they gone astray after Spenser with the kinsmen of the elder of the two, could have been worth Philaster or The Spanish Curate, The Maid's Tragedy or The Knight of Malta. But I do sincerely regret that a far humbler labourer in the same Elysian field should have wasted the treasure of a sweet bright fancy and the charm of a true lyrical gift on work too hard and high for him. John Day should never have written for the stage of Shakespeare. The pretty allegory of his Peregrinatio Scholastica, a really charming example of that singular branch of mediæval literature which had yet to find its last consummate utterance in the Pilgrim's Progress of a half-inspired but wholly demented and demoralized Christomaniac, is perhaps better reading than his comedies; and it is not the least of our many debts to the industrious devotion of Mr. Bullen that we owe to him the publication of this long buried and forgotten little work of kindly and manly and rather pathetic fancy. There is nothing in it of such reptile rancour as hisses and spits and pants with all the recreant malignity of a fangless viper, through the stagnant and fetid fenlands of The Return from Parnassus. We are touched and interested by the modest plea—it is rather a plea than a plaint—of the poor simple scholar; but perhaps we only realize how hard and heavy must have been the pressure of necessity or mischance on his gentle and fanciful genius when we begin to read the first extant play in which he took a fitful and indistinguishable part. And yet there is good matter in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, however hasty and headlong be the management or conduct of the huddled and muddled combination or confusion of plots. The scene in which poor Bess, driven toward suicide by the villainy of her guardian and the infidelity of her betrothed, first comes across her disguised and unrecognized father, and turns all her own sorrow into pity for him and devotion to the needs of a suffering stranger, is a good example of that exquisite simplicity in expression of pathetic fancy which was common to all the dramatic poets of the divine Shakespearean generation, and peculiar to them.

Art thou blind, sayest thou? Let me see thy face:
O, let me kiss it too, and with my tears
Wash off those blemishes which cruel time
Hath furrowed in thy cheeks! O, couldst thou see,
I'd show thine eyes whom thou dost represent.
I called thee father—ay, thou shalt be my father;
Nor scorn my proffer: were my father here
He'd tell thee that his daughter held him dear;
But in his absence, father, thou art he.

It would seem that the very existence and presence of Shakespeare on English earth must have infected with a celestial contagion of incomparable style the very lowliest of his followers in art and his fellows in aspiration. It would also seem that the instinct of such emotion, the capacity of such expression, had died out for ever with the afterglow of his sunset. Even the grateful and joyful appreciation of the legacies bequeathed to us by the poets of that transcendent age is now no natural and general property of all Englishmen who can read, but the exceptional and eccentric quality of a few surviving students who prefer old English silver and gold to new foreign brass and copper.

Shakespeare and Marlowe to the vile seem vile:
Filths savour but themselves.

Themselves, that is, and their Ibsens. “Like lips, like lettuce.”

There is some good simple fun too in this homely and humble old play: the Norfolk yeomen are not all unworthy compatriots of Tennyson's immortal Northern Farmers; there is something in young Tom's reflection, “Well, I see I might ha' kept company with honest men all the days o' my life ere I should ha' learned half this knavery.” Worse jests than this have found wider echoes of laughter; and Tom approves himself a good fellow, and a living creature of a real creator, when he risks his life for the blind old beggar: “I'll take up my lodging on God's dear ground ere thou shalt take any harm.” It is a pity we have lost the double sequel to this play; I for one, at all events, should rejoice to read “the second part of Strowd” and “the third part of Tom Strowd.” His evident popularity does credit to the honest and wholesome taste of his audience. It is a curious sign of the times that Day and his comrade Chettle should have ventured and found it profitable to venture a trespass on ground preoccupied already by Marlowe, if not by Shakespeare; and we can only wonder whether Duke Humphrey and Cardinal Beaufort reappeared and renewed their tragic wrangling on the stage of the second or the third part of a story transported from the traditional date of Henry the Third to the theatrically popular date of Henry the Sixth. It is perhaps needless to remind any reader that the blind beggar who played his part on the Bethnal Green of our old ballad-mongers was supposed to be the surviving son of the great Earl Simon, blinded and left for dead on the battlefield of Evesham.

A quaint and primitive little play, The Maid's Metamorphosis, printed in the year which Henslowe gives as the date of the production of The Blind Beggar, who was not to see the light of print till fifty-nine years later, has been conjecturally and plausibly assigned by Mr. Gosse to the hand of Day. The fluent simplicity of rhyming verse is sometimes sweet as well as smooth. In the first scene of the second act there is so singular an instance of the crude and childish licence which allowed an actor in the play to address the audience, that I should have expected to find it a familiar quotation in the notes or commentaries of editors who were scholars, and not such impudently ignorant impostors as have sometimes undertaken a work of which they did not understand the simplest and most elementary conditions. “(He speaks to the people.) Well, I pray you look to my master, for here I leave him amongst you.” There are touches of pleasant fancy and joyous music in this evidently juvenile poem which may recall to a modern reader the lighter moods of Keats. Its author, like the author of Doctor Dodipoll, must have had Shakespeare on the brain; no reader of either play can miss or can mistake the gracious influence of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Comedy of Errors. The pun on the words Pan and pot anticipates a jest unconsciously borrowed and worked to death by the typically Caledonian humour of Carlyle.

Any form of tribute to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, any kind of witness to the popularity of the Arcadia, does honour to his lovers in the past and gives pleasure to its lovers in the present; but one at least of these latter must express a wish that the playwrights would have left that last and loveliest of chivalrous and pastoral romances reverentially and lovingly alone. The prologue to The Isle of Gulls is a bright and amusing little sample of dramatic satire; its three types of critic, the lover of libel, the lover of ribaldry, and the lover of fustian, are outlines of figures not unworthy of Ben Jonson. But there is little or rather nothing in the five acts thus ingeniously introduced of the peculiar charm which pervades the whole atmosphere of the Arcadia: Day's young princes are mere puppets, with no trace of likeness to the noble original figures of Pyrocles and Musidorus; not for a moment can his light and loose-tongued heroines, whatever grace of expression and of verse may be wasted on the wanton and fantastic exposure of their trivial inclinations, recall the two glorious sister figures of Sidney's divine invention. There is only one “person of the play” who has any life or likeness of life in him: the rascally adventurer Manasses, moralist and satirist, informer and swindler and preacher; a very model and prototype of the so-called new journalist. The scene in which he explains his professional aptitudes and relates his varied experience is the only vigorous piece of writing in the ragged and slipshod little play; his Puritan sermon anticipates with quite curious precision the peculiar eloquence of Mr. Chadband. There is some rough and ready fun in the part of Miso; but the whole concern is on the whole but “an indigest deformed lump.” The soliloquy which opens the fifth act has real sweetness as well as smoothness of metre as well as fancy. A few lines may serve to give the reader a taste of Day's simple and gentle genius or gift of style:

Farewell, bright sun, thou lightener of all eyes;
Thou fall'st to give a brighter beam to rise:
Each tree and shrub wear trammels of thy hair,
But these are wires for none but kings to wear.

For these we should probably read hers. The play is as carelessly printed as it was carelessly composed.

The gentle minutes, crowned with crystal flowers,
Losing their youths, are grown up perfect hours
To hasten my delight: the bashful moon,
That since her dalliance with Endymion
Durst never walk by day, is under sail.

What follows is pretty and musical, but these are the best lines.

Shakespeare and Heywood have both touched smilingly on the “infinite variety” in style and subject of their contemporary playwrights: neither has included in his list of the sundry sorts and kinds of play then aiming at popularity or bidding for success one curious and interesting class, generally perhaps interesting on historical rather than literary grounds: the biographical drama. There are better and there are worse examples of this kind than The Travels of Three English Brothers; the anonymous play of Sir Thomas More, which has scenes and passages in it of a quiet beauty and grave charm peculiar to the unknown and unconjecturable writer, is very much better, and probably the finest existing poem of its class; Thomas Lord Cromwell, by the new or German Shakespeare, must alike in reason and in charity be hopefully accepted as the worst. The curious and amorphous play in which three men of genius—no competent reader of their remaining works will deny the claim to that distinction of Rowley, of Wilkins, or of Day—took it by turns to dash off a sketch of incidents supplied by report, and to compile a supplement of inventions huddled up at random, is almost equally interesting and disappointing to a student of heroic biography or a lover of the drama which depends on adventure and event. Heywood was the man who should have undertaken this subject: he would have made out of it a simple and a noble work of artless and unconscious art. The three adventurous brothers, whose doings and sufferings, wise or unwise and deserved or undeserved, can hardly be remembered without sympathy by any not unworthy countryman of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard Burton, do not seem to have made any complaint of the liberties taken by their three volunteer laureates with their persons or their names, their characters or their experiences. And yet the representation of a Christian hero, who might conceivably and quite possibly have been sitting among the audience, fastened in the stocks and distended on the rack before the eyes of “the great Turk,” must make a modern Englishman feel that the honest and admiring enthusiasm of a dramatic poet no greater than Rowley or Wilkins or Day might be almost more terrible as an infliction than the pitiless and unscrupulous animosity of Aristophanes or Shakespeare or Molière. Cleon or Lucy or Cotin may have held up his head and smiled upon the foolish and vulgar spectator who could imagine him accessible or vulnerable by the satire of The Knights, or The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Les Femmes Savantes: an English gentleman must have been a very Stoic if he could so far sacrifice his natural instinct of personal reserve and noble shyness as to abstain from wincing at his exhibition or exposure as a hero and a martyr, on the chance that the groundlings might be kindled and stimulated by his example to a keener sense of religious or patriotic duty.

The quaint and original prologue to this singular play is perceptibly and demonstrably the work of Rowley: who, though assuredly no dunce, would seem to have anticipated the brilliant and convenient theory of certain modern dunces that good metre and musical verse must needs imply tenuity of meaning and deficiency of thought—as in the notorious and lamentable instances of Coleridge and Shelley, whose melodious emptiness and vacuous efflorescence of mere colour and mere sound were so justly and so loudly derided and deplored by contemporary criticism. The singular point in Rowley's case is that he really could write excellent good verse if he chose, but usually preferred to hobble and stagger rather than walk steady or run straight. Lamb, who liked him so well, and took such pleasure in culinary humour, must surely have missed this curious illustration of the process by which fact has to be trimmed up with fiction for the purposes of the historic stage:

Who gives a fowl unto his cook to dress
Likewise expects to have a fowl again;
Though in the cook's laborious workmanship
Much may be diminisht, somewhat added,
(The loss of feathers and the gain of sauce),
Yet in the back surrender of this dish
It is, and may be truly called, the same.
Such are our acts: should our tedious Muse
Pace the particulars of our travellers,
Five days would break the limits of our scenes
But to express the shadows: therefore we
(Leaving the feathers and some needless stuff)
Present you with the fairest of our feast,
Clothing our truth within an argument
Fitting the stage and your attention,
Yet not so hid but that she may appear
To be herself, even truth.

Eccentric in expression as this apology may seem, I know not where to look for an apter or happier explanation and vindication of the method by which the nudity and aridity of mere casual fact must needs be clothed and vivified by poetry or fiction with the likeness and the spirit of enduring and essential truth. The symbol or emblem is less refined and ingenious than that of The Ring and the Book, but hardly less exact in its aptitude of application.

A curious use of a word which conveys to modern English ears none but a very different meaning may be noted in the dedication, where the authors express a modest wish to have “a safe harbour and umbrage for our well-willing yet weak labours.” One or two necessary corrections or completions of an obviously defective text may be worth transcription:

Refrain therefore, and [know,] whate'er you are.

(p. 38)

I thank thee: less [or more] I cannot give thee.

(p. 45)

An over-austere or impatient critic might set down his opinion that the opening scene of Law Tricks was less like the professional writing of a sane adult than the furtive scribbling of a clever child; that a few pretty verses sprinkled here and there throughout the infantile five acts of this innocent little play could hardly carry weight enough with even the most uncritical reader to make him doubt whether a schoolboy with a touch of ambition to give something like shape to his rudest fancy and something of colour to his crudest emotion might not have written it against time between school hours—and hesitated to submit it to the judicial and jocose opinion of any but his most intimate and most closely coeval friend; that the two pages are the only satisfactory figures in it—their elders, virtuous or murderous, being comically rather than lamentably like the creatures of such a boy's brain. The mention of “Justice Slender” in the first scene is noticeable as an early and blundering reference to the text of a play which, though published four years before, can hardly have been known to Day except on the stage; the hastiest reader of Shakespeare's first rough draft could hardly have confused the two immortal cousins as the memory of a playgoer who had but once seen it acted may apparently if not evidently have done. The dialogue is sometimes bright and pleasant; it shoots and sparkles through the rhyming retort of fencing epigrams as lightly and gracefully as Shakespeare's in any of his earliest and idlest wit-combats or encounters of fancy. There are not a few notable words and phrases in the text worth registering for an English dictionary that should be worthy to stand beside Littré's; and there are touches of humour illustrative of manners which might repay the notice of a social historian. This passage, for instance, anticipates the aristocratic satire of Etherege: “Still in the bogs of melancholy! 'tis staler than tobacco: not so much but the singing cobbler is grown melancholy, and corrects shoes in humour; fie on't!”¹ That modern American slang has its roots in old or obsolete English is a truth once more attested by this curious passage: “Why, she is of my near affinity! Should I see my near affinity go in tatters?” (Act ii, Scene 1). It may possibly be just worth notice that the same speaker in a later scene echoes the famous and defiant query of Ancient Pistol, “Have we not Hiren here?” and it seems to me certainly worth while to note a singularly modern or modern-sounding use of a commonplace adjective just afterwards; “We will be odd in all things.” I do not know whether camp-ball and football be the same game, but I should guess so from Tom Strowd's offer (The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, v. i) to “play gole at camp-ball.” Football was then held a plebeian game—witness Shakespeare, to say nothing of Beaumont and Fletcher. Anyhow, the word is a rare one.

There is about as much substance in Humour out of Breath as in a broken thread of gossamer; but even in the slightest and lightest of dramatic playthings misconstructed by the very clumsiest craftsmen who opened their toyshop on the stage of Shakespeare there is a touch, a hint, an indication of something more graceful and fanciful and childlike in its pretty silly idleness or waywardness or incompetence than can be found among the wares of earlier or later “factors for the scene.” Mr. Bullen's generous commendation of such merit as may be discovered in action or in character by a kindly or friendly reader will be accepted rather than controverted by a reasonably good-humoured critic; who nevertheless may be expected to regret that a little more than the less than little which has been was not made of the faintly pencilled outlines and suggestions which promise now and then something better than we find realized in this unsteady and headlong little play. The divine and universal influence of Shakespeare lends it something of life and light and charm; we feel once more that the very humblest and hastiest of his faithful and loyal followers has something to give us which no later stage poet of more vigorous and serious ability, no Dryden or Otway or Southerne or Rowe, can give. There is more merit in the least of these four playwrights, whichever he may be, than it is now the fashion to allow him; but in all those later days of luminous decadence there was but one of their kind who could write a verse or two after the manner of the Shakespearean age in its earliest and simplest expression of dramatic rapture by alternate or elegiac rhyme. No competent judge of poetic style would assign the following verses to a poet or a dramatist of the Restoration:

Why was I destined to be born above,
By midwife Honour to the light conveyed,
Fame's darling, the bright infant of high love,
Crowned, and in Empire's golden cradle laid;
Rocked by the hand of empresses, that yield
Their sceptres formed to rattles for my hand,
Born to the wealth of the green floating field,
And the rich dust of all the yellow land?

Any one who knows anything of the subject, if asked to name at a venture the author of these last two lovely lines, would assuredly name Tennyson. They belong to Nathaniel Lee, and occur in the first scene of the most hopelessly and obviously delirious or lunatic performance that surely can ever have got itself acted. I wish I could find anything in Day so wholly and so delightfully worthy of the hand which wrote the lovely scene of lyric and romantic courtship between Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana: but there is some light faint breath of the luminous April air which stirs and shines through every scene of Shakespeare's earliest plays in the opening of this fantastic little comedy. And there is something of a higher note in the utterance of the banished Duke's irreconcilable son, when he refuses to acquiesce with his father and sisters in submission to adversity without hope of retribution or restoration, but repudiates all treacherous means of revenge on their supplanter:

I will not play the coward, kill him first
And send my challenge after.

This almost tragic figure, which might have been borrowed from Marston and tempered or toned down in the borrowing, seems to bring luck to the lesser and gentler poet; the character of his mistress takes something of life and charm on it when he leaves her, rejected and contemptuous, and the page to whom she has confessed that she “cannot live without him” replies, “O that he knew it, lady!” The rejoinder is worthy of a greater and more famous dramatist. “He does: he would never have left me else. He does.” And the wrangling and love-making dialogue that follows is worthy either of Marston or of Jonson. But on the whole this play might not unjustly be described as Marston and water. Antonio, though he has some very pretty and fanciful verses to say, is a very thin “moonshine shadow” of Andrugio. But in lighter things the lighter touch of Day is graceful and pleasant enough; the scene of blind man's buff in which the prisoner escapes by the help of his princess and her page, and leaves his gaoler in gaol, is as pretty an interlude of farce as even Molière could have devised by way of relief to the graver interest of romantic comedy.²

In the moral and satirical allegory of the scholar's pilgrimage, for the survival or revival of which Day and we owe sincere thanks to Mr. Bullen, the opening attack on the tricks of tradesmen is noticeable for a realistic force of humour not unworthy of Dekker. The wealth of curious terms and phrases would amply repay the research of a social historian or an intelligent lexicographer.³ There are such vivid and picturesque touches in the description of “Poneria, or Sin,” as would be famous if they had but had the luck to be laid on by the hand of no better a poet than Bunyan. For example: “Her hair, that hung in loose trammels about her shoulders, like find threads of gold, seemed like a curled flame that burns downwards.” The entire allegory is alive with ingenious and imaginative invention of incident and symbol. There are touches of genuine if not very subtle or recondite humour in the seventeenth tractate: the description of “a kind of justice in law” and his household is hardly unworthy of Fielding or of Dickens; and “the new vicar, made out of an old friar that had been twice turned at a religion-dresser's,” is a clergyman fit to stand beside the reverend and immortal figure of Parson Trulliber. In the nineteenth tractate it is curious to come once more upon the old mediæval fable or allegory of human life as a tree growing in the side of a gulf or pit, with God as a raging lion and the devil as a fiery serpent above it and beneath, and the white mouse Day and the black mouse Night ever nibbling at the root of it.⁴

The best known or rather the least unknown of Day's works belongs to the same category of allegorical satire. Leigh Hunt, who spoke of it with his usual and unfailing charm of sympathetic and sensitive appreciation in that delightful book which will always be especially cherished by all to whom his genius and Richard Doyle's are dear, was as right as might have been expected in his objection that the characters who play their parts in The Parliament of Bees were too unlike the makers of honey to represent them fairly in sight of the laziest and most indulgent fancy. He knew this quaint and queer and beautiful poem only by the extracts given in Lamb's priceless “Specimens,” and consequently could not guess that it was mainly intended as a direct and obvious presentation, satirical or panegyrical, of contemporary and characteristic types of men and women under the merely nominal and transparent form of bees. It is a real pity that the happy and happy-making author of A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla should never have read even the title of the original version unearthed by the deservedly fortunate and thank-worthy research of Mr. Bullen: “An old Manuscript containing the Parliament of Bees, found in a hollow tree in a garden at Hybla, in a strange language, and now faithfully translated into easy English verse by John Day, Cantabrig.”—who ventures to append the motto chosen by Shakespeare for the first book which ever bore on its title-page the most illustrious of all mortal or immortal names. Balzac, if not Hugo, might have been interested to learn from the dedication “how Lewis the eleventh (of that name) King of France took notice, and bountifully rewarded a decayed gardener, who presented him with a bunch of carrots.”

The partnership of Dekker in this work, detected and verified by Mr. Bullen, is confirmed beyond all question by comparison of the good metre in the charming sixth scene with the scandalously slipshod verse which here and there disfigures those which precede and follow it: a perverse and villainous defect peculiar to Dekker alone among all his fellows; a sin out of which even the merciless lash of Ben Jonson failed to whip him into repentance and reformation. The changes from the manuscript in the printed text are sometimes at least such improvements as transfigure rather poor verse into really good poetry; and sometimes of a much more dubious kind. A passage which does not reappear in the printed Parliament of Bees, but recurs in Dekker's Wonder of a Kingdom, seems to me better expressed in its original manuscript form:

He that will read my acts of charity
Shall find them writ in ashes, which the wind
Shall scatter ere he spells them.

In the text of Dekker's play we find this surely inferior version:

He that will read the wasting of my gold
Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind
Will scatter ere he spends it.

But if Wordsworth, Landor, and even Tennyson, did not always change for the better, we can hardly expect a more infallible felicity in revision from Dekker or from Day.

That the third “Character” belongs to Dekker seems to me evident from the cancelled couplet which announces without introducing an important figure in The Wonder of a Kingdom, the disowned and impoverished brother of the profligate and ruffianly braggart. As that gallant and ill-requited soldier is the next “Character,” this scene must also, I presume, be Dekker's. But it is Day, I think, who touches the loathsome lips of the typical and eternal poetaster—sycophant and slanderer, coward and liar—with indirect and involuntary praise of Persius. I doubt whether Dekker could have construed a dozen consecutive lines of the noble young Roman stoic.

How Day could have had the heart to cancel some of the sweetest lines he ever wrote I cannot conjecture; but the strange fact is that these pretty verses were struck away from the sixth and gracefullest scene of the most delightful little poem he has left us:

A pair of suns move in his spherelike eyes;
Were I love's pirate, he should be my prize.
Only his person lightens all the room,
For where his beauty shines night dares not come.
His frown would school a tyrant to be meek;
Love's chronicle is painted on his cheek,
Where lilies and fresh roses spread so high
As death himself to see them fade would die.

This passage can hardly have been cancelled because the characteristics of fascinating youth described in it were rather human than apiarian: the whole poem, on that score, would at once deserve the castigation of fire.

The seventh interlude, brightly and lightly written after the ready fashion of Dekker, has just the straightforward simplicity of his satire in its caricatures of parsimony and prodigality, with something of his roughness and laxity in metre. In the ninth and tenth we find him again, and recognize in each the first shape or sketch of yet another scene in the tragicomedy to which so much was transferred from this as yet unpublished poem. The eighth, a sequel or counterpart to the sixth, is no less evidently the work of Day: as smooth and musical in metre, as extravagant and fantastic in conceit. The two sweet and graceful scenes which wind up the pretty and fanciful weft of this lyric and satiric poem are perhaps the best evidence left us of Day's especial and delightful gift; fresh, bright, and delicate as the spirit and the genius of the poet and critic who discovered him, and gave his modest and gentle name the imperishable and most enviable honour of association with the name of Lamb.

Notes

1. For “doubt” (Act ii, Scene 1) we must obviously read “doubted”—certainly not “do't,” which is hardly sense, as tobacco is not exactly an aphrodisiac. Profligate the prince is, says the jesting speaker; “and that which makes him doubted most, he is in love with the Indian punk Tobacco.” In the ninth line of p. 23 “induce” is, of course, a misprint for “endure.” In the second line of p. 42 a stage direction has crept into the text; the words “discover Lurdo behind the arras” can only mean “Lurdo is discovered”; as part of the speech into which the printer has jumbled them they are mere nonsense. In the sixth line of the pretty rhyming scene which follows, the word “away” is a palpable mistake for “awry.” The right reading is pathetic and consistent; the wrong reading stultifies a very graceful passage. On p. 78 there are two consecutive and curious errors: “ungive” for “ungyve” (= unfetter), and ‘Heate” for “Hecate.”

2. In the third line of the second speech of this play there is an obviously ridiculous misprint: the “steeds still armed” could only have been “banded with steel,” not “branded”—or fired.

3. In his description of Envy, Day uses the word “hag” as a masculine substantive, and Anger he defines as “a right low country boot-haler.” The rare word “swelted” which occurs in the sixth tractate—“the beauteous flowers were nothing else but swelted weeds”—is apparently another form of “wilted.”

4. In the seventh tractate there is a curious phrase which is new to me: “he is his own as sure as a club.”