ADDITIONAL NOTES.

HE ALCHEMIST] Coleridge said on one occasion, "I think Edipus Tyrannus, THE ALCHEMIST, and Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned." Table Talk.

P. 3. Jonson chose this.] A few more lines of this admirable Prologue should have been quoted. It was first spoken at the Duke of York's theatre,

in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in February, 1668:

"To say this comedy pleased long ago

Is not enough to make it pass you now.
Yet, gentlemen, your ancestors had wit,

When few men censured, and when fewer writ;
And Jonson, of those few the best, chose this
As the best model of his master piece.
Subtle was got by our Albumazar,
That Alchymist by this Astrologer;

Here he was fashioned, and we may suppose,
He liked the fashion well who wore the clothes.
But Ben made nobly his what he did mould,
What was another's lead becomes his gold :
Like an unrighteous conqueror he reigns,
Yet rules that well which he unjustly gains."

Dryden not only forgot that the Alchemist was produced before Albumazar, but that Shakspeare was alive in 1610, and for some years afterwards.

P. 4. The Alchemist was one of the first plays revived at the Restoration.] That it certainly was, but not so early as the Silent Woman. See vol. iii. p. 326. On the 22nd June, 1661, Pepys records: "Then to the theatre, the Alchymist, which is a most incom

parable play." Again, 17th April, 1669, "Hearing that the Alchymist was acted we did go to the King's House; and it is still a good play, having not been acted for two or three years before; but I do miss Clun for the Doctor." Clun was famous in the part of Subtle, and had been acting it on the 2nd August, 1664, just previous to his being waylaid and murdered near Tottenham Court as he was riding to his country house at Kentish Town. The Dol Common of the revival was a Mrs. Corey, who so identified herself with the part that she went by no other name. In the Garrick days the part fell first to Kitty Clive and afterwards to Mrs. Pritchard. "If I remember rightly," says Tom Davies, "the former, by lessening the vulgarity of the prostitute, did not give so just an idea of her as the latter."

P. 5. Lady Mary Wroth.] Her work was entitled, in imitation of her uncle's, "The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. Written by the Right Honourable the Lady Mary Wroath, Daughter to the Right Noble Robert Earl of Leicester, and Neece to the ever famous and renowned Sir Phillipe Sidney, Knight. And to ye most excelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke, late deceased.” 1621, folio. Southey wrote in the margin against the note (1). "Gifford could not have looked at Lady Wroth's book." See, however, more on the subject, vol. viii. p. 391.

It is very pleasing to trace this young lady's career from birth to bridal in the two folios of the family papers. She was born 10th October, 1587, so was in her 23rd year when the Alchemist was dedicated to her. Her first public appearance at Court had been in December, 1602, when "in the afternoone she dawnced before the Queen two Galliards, with one Mr. Palmer, the admirablest dawncer of this time; both were much commended by her Majestie; then she dawnced with hym a Corante."

P. 6. For they commend writers as they do fencers or wrestlers.] Gifford did not notice that this passage is found word for word in the Discoveries, No. 70, vol. ix. p. 155.

P. 9. The sickness hot, &c.] "Sickness hot" does not mean the hot (or sweating) sickness, but merely that the plague was prevalent. So Cary in his Memoirs (p. 160) says, "In May after the King went to Dover to meet his new Queen, and by the time he came back with her to White-hall the plague grew so hot in London as none that could tell how to get out of it would stay there. The infection grew hotter and hotter."

P. 9. Flat bawdry with the stone.] Mr. G. A. Sala, whose discursive genius leads him to take interest in every branch of literature, writes to remind me that the "stone" of these impostors was frequently a crystal or a mirror, and that one of their frequent

practices was to show jealous husbands tableaux vivants of their wives' adultery with their paramours." Jonson is careful to mention that Dol Common belonged not to Face's but to Subtle's establishment, where her services would be frequently required, as when the party more immediately interested failed to perceive the reflection in the stone, a "virgin of a pure life was sent for to see and describe. See also post, p. 72 :

"I do not like your philosophical bawds,

Their stone is letchery enough to pay for."

P. 10. Fortune, that favours fools (Note 4). The passage of Every Man Out of his Humour is at vol. ii. p. 37. Both notes are taken from Upton, who also refers to As You Like It, where Jaques describes his meeting the fool in the forest:

"Who railed on Lady Fortune in good terms,

(In good set terms) and yet a motley fool.

Good morrow, fool,' quoth I. 'No, sir,' quoth he, 'Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune."

P. 11. Dol Common.] In his previous play, the Silent Woman (vol. iii. p. 376), Morose had prayed that the "best and last fortune to a new-made knight, should be "to make Doll Tearsheet or Kate Common a lady." We have here a new name made out of the two.

P. 12. Three-pound-thrum.] I differ from both Whalley and Gifford about this phrase. We learn from the Devil is an Ass, vol. v. p. 20, that "four pound a year" was the customary wage of a man-servant, and thrum was the name for the useless ends of the weaver's warp. Subtle, therefore, meant that Face was an underpaid and utterly disregarded servant of the most inferior grade.

P. 13.

At Pie-corner,

Taking your meal of steam in, from cooks' stalls.] This passage ought to serve for answer to those who maintain that the name of Pie-corner "is derived from the French word pied-cornier, used in our old forest nomenclature for a boundary tree." We shall find it mentioned again in Bartholomew Fair, post, p. 374.

P. 13. Powder-corns shot at the artillery-yard.] In the Underwoods, No. lxiii. (vol. viii. p. 410), Jonson breaks out with:

"Well, I say, thrive, thrive, brave Artillery-yard,
Thou seed-plot of the war! that hast not spared
Powder or paper to bring up the youth

Of London in the military truth.”