Ye panting virgins, that do meet TO ELLINDA, THAT LATELY I HAVE NOT WRITTEN. I. F in me anger, or disdaine In you, or both, made me refraine II. But if alone some pious thought III. So then this silence doth reveal No thought of negligence, but zeal: For, as in adoration, This is love's true devotion; Children and fools the words repeat, But anch'rites pray in tears and sweat. ELLINDA'S GLOVE. HOU SONNET. I. snowy farme with thy five tenements!1 Tell thy white mistris here was one, That call'd to pay his dayly rents; gone, And thou left voyd to rude possession. II. But grieve not, pretty Ermin cabinet, Thy alabaster lady will come home; If not, what tenant can there fit The slender turnings of thy narrow roome, III. Then give me leave to leave my rent with thee: For though the lute's too high for me, Yet servants, knowing minikin3 nor base, 1i. e. the white glove of the lady with its five fingers. • Doom. A description of musical pin attached to a lute. It was only brought into play by accomplished musicians. In the address of "The Country Suiter to his Love," printed in Cotgrave's Wits Interpreter, 1662, p. 119, the man says:— "Fair Wench! I cannot court thy sprightly eyes With a base-viol plac'd betwixt my thighs, BEING TREATED. TO ELLINDA. OR cherries plenty, and for corans That well did wash downe pasties-Mary; 3 I cannot lisp, nor to a fiddle sing, Nor run upon a high-strecht minikin.” In Middleton's Familie of Love, 1608 (Works by Dyce, ii. 127) there is the following passage: 66 Gudgeon. Ay, and to all that forswear marriage, and can be content with other men's wives. Gerardine. Of which consort you two are grounds; one touches the bass, and the other tickles the minikin." This expression has reference to the old practice of drinking beer and wine out of very high glasses, with divisions marked on them. A yard of ale is even now a well understood term: nor is the custom itself out of date, since in some parts of the country one is asked to take, not a glass, but a yard. The ell was of course, strictly speaking, a larger measure than a yard; but it was often employed as a mere synonyme or equivalent. Thus, in Maroccus Extaticus, 1595, Bankes says:-" Measure, Marocco, nay, nay, they that take up commodities make no difference for measure between a Flemish elle and an English yard." 2 In the new edition of Nares (1859), this very passage is quoted to illustrate the meaning of the word, which is defined rather vaguely to be a cask. Obviously the word signifies some thing of the kind, but the explanation does not at all satisfy me. I suspect that a flute of canary was so called from the cask having several vent-holes, in the same way that the French call a lamprey fleute d'Aleman from the fish having little holes in the upper part of its body. 3 Forsyth, in his Antiquary's Portfolio, 1825, mentions certain For peason, chickens, sawces high, Where it is thought I too may peepe in glutton-feasts," ," which used formerly to be celebrated periodically in honour of the Virgin; perhaps the pasties used on these occasions were thence christened pasties-Mary. .38 1 Venison pies or pasties were the most favourite dish in this country in former times; innumerable illustrations might be furnished of the high esteem in which this description of viand was held by our ancestors, who regarded it as a thoroughly English luxury. The anonymous author of Hora Subsecivæ, 1620, p. 3 (this volume is supposed to have been written by Giles Brydges, Lord Chandos), describes an affected Englishman who has been travelling on the Continent, as "sweating at the sight of a pasty of venison," and as "swearing that the only delicacies be mushrooms, or caviare, or snayles." "The full-cram'd dishes made the table crack, Gammons of bacon, brawn, and what was chief, Fat venison pasties smoaking, 'tis no fable, Swans in their broath came swimming to the table.”Poems of BEN JOHNSON Junior, by W. S. 1672, p. 3. "And when your 2 An allusion to the scantiness of forks. justice of peace is knuckle-deep in goose, you may without disparagement to your blood, though you have a lady to your mother, fall very manfully to your woodcocks."-DECKER'S Guls Horn Book, 1609, ed. Nott, p. 121. "Hodge. Forks! what be they? Brought into custom here, as they are in Italy, JONSON'S The Devil is an Ass, act v. scene 4. For glasses, heads, hands, bellies full Next beg I to present my duty Nor must I passe the lovely Alice, "Lovell. Your hand, good sir. Greedy. This is a lord, and some think this a favour; The sirloin of beef. 2 Rotterdam. |