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PREFACE.

THE present volume contains a great variety of illustration, being a Glossary of uncommon words, of less uncommon words in their different significations, of passages which convey an obscure or doubtful sense, of proverbial expressions, of cant phrases, of manners and customs, of games and sports, of dresses and weapons, &c., and of numerous allusions with which only archæologists and antiquaries are supposed to be familiar.

Among the difficulties incident to a glossarist not the least is that of determining the nicer shades of meaning in which many words are used; and very probably some philologers may think that I have occasionally made distinctions where none in fact exist, and sometimes confounded what ought to have been kept distinct. Nor do I feel sure that sundry other things will not be objected to, and perhaps with justice, in such a mass of omnigenous matter as the following pages comprise.

In availing myself of the comments of my predecessors from Theobald downwards, I have throughout acknowledged my obligations whenever they were at all important; which I the rather mention because of late it has been too much the fashion to borrow largely and verbatim from the notes of the Variorum Shakespeare, and yet to conceal the debt.

A. D.

NOTE.

[BESIDES the additions Mr. Dyce had made to his Glossary in the revised copy of his Shakespeare, from which this edition is printed, some further, though slight, insertions were discovered upon a set of loose sheets after a considerable portion of the present volume was worked off. The entries which were found too late to be incorporated in the text are given here, and those which followed p. 254 appear in their in the body of the Glossary.]

p. 47, after line 31, insert:

proper place

bottle of hay-A, a bunch, a bundle, a truss of hay, ii. 305. p. 47, after line 33, insert:

"This explanation [Ritson's] misses the peculiar force of the epithet bottled, which is exactly equivalent to bunch-backed, and like it emphasizes Richard's deformity. That bottled spider,' therefore, literally means that humped or hunched venomous creature. The term bottled is still provincially applied to the big, largebodied, round-backed spider, that in the summer and autumn spreads its web across open spaces in the hedges, 'obvious to vagrant flies.' What, also, has escaped the commentators, the word bottle was used with this precise signification for a hunch or hump in Shakspeare's own day. In a popular work published a few years before he came to London, and with which he was familiar, we find 'bottles of flesh' given as a synonym for great wens in the throat-the Italian word gozzuti being glossed in the margin as follows: men in the mountaynes with great bottels of flesh under their chin through the drinking of snow water.' We still retain this meaning of the word in a number of phrases and epithets, such as bottlenose, a big or bunchy nose; bottlehead, provincial for great, thick, or blockhead; and, not to multiply examples, in the bluebottle fly, which is literally the bunchy or unwieldy blue fly." The Edinburgh Review, July 1868, p. 66.

viii

p. 113, after line 13, insert:

NOTE.

(According to Fortiguerra, when Astolfo died;

"non fu posto in una buca,

Ma con incenso, mirra, ed elisire
Fu imbalsamato, acciò si riconduca
Intero in Francia, e di nero cipresso

Fero una cassa, e sel portaro appresso."

Ricciardetto, c. xix. st. 82.)

p. 121, line 25, add:

Compare, too;

"Gripe. But I am sure she loues not him.

Will. Nay, I dare take it on my death she loues him."
Wily Begvilde, sig. c verso, ed. 1606.

p. 154, after line 35, insert:

("Che quella grotta e quel gran precipizio

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Non era cosa vera, ma apparente

Ma le donzelle e il fortunato ospizio

Fantastico non era certamente."

Fortiguerra's Ricciardetto, c. xxi. st. 76.)

p. 227, line 28, before virginal insert virginals or.

p. 227, line 36, add: and see virginals—The.

p. 254, after line 13, insert:

(Compare Peele's Edward I.;

"Edward, my king, my lord, and lover dear,
Full little dost thou wot how this retreat,
As with a sword, hath slain poor Mortimer."

Works, p. 390, ed. Dyce.)

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