I pray thee that thou shorten not my days,
Ceasing to honour this disnatured flesh
That was my mother."

This is borrowed from "The Revenger's Tragedy," by Cyril Tourneur.

“Forgive me, Heaven, to call my mother wicked!
Oh, lessen not my days upon the earth.

I cannot honour her."

66

PAGE 117, ACT III., SCENE I.

The wind when first he rose and went abroad
Thro' the waste region, felt himself at fault,
Wanting a voice; and suddenly to earth
Descended with a wafture and a swoop;
Where, wandering volatile from kind to kind,
He woo'd the several trees to give him one.

Did he solicit, and from her he drew

A voice so constant, soft, and lowly deep,
That there he rested, welcoming in her

A mild memorial of the ocean cave
Where he was born."

Perhaps I have been indebted here, though if so, I was unconscious of it at the time, to a well-known passage in 'Gebir.' At all events, that passage cannot be too often quoted, and I will transcribe it here :—

"But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue

Within, and they that lustre have imbibed

In the Sun's palace-porch, where, when unyoked,
His chariot-wheel stands mid-way in the wave :
Shake one and it awakens; then apply

Its polish'd lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there."

And by the crown of his head I know the times.
Grow they ascetic, then his tonsure widens;
Or free, it narrows in."

The tonsure was enforced upon the Secular Clergy, as well as on the Regulars; and as the Anglo-Saxons were very proud of their hair, this was a point of discipline which sometimes gave rise to difficulties.

PAGE 172, ACT III., SCENE VIII.

"He bids you know that in this land this day He finds more fat than bones, more monks than soldiers."

I have taken the words of Fuller: "Indeed one may safely affirm that the multitude of monasteries invited the invasion and facilitated the conquest of the Danes over England..... because England had at this time more flesh or fat than bones, wherein the strength of a body consists; more monks than military men."- Church History, Book II., S. 51.

PAGE 211, ACT V., SCENE II.

"But now I wax old,

Sick, sorry, and cold,

Like muck upon mould

I widder away."

I have taken the liberty to borrow this from the "Processus Noe," one of the Towneley Mysteries, printed by the Surtees Society. In another place I have taken a mode of expression from the following lines in the “Mactatio Abel:"

"Felowes, here I you

forbede

To make nother nose nor cry:
Whoso' is so hardy to do that dede,

The Devylle hang hym up to dry."

PAGE 213, ACT V., SCENE II.

66 At Winchester

Ye heard how, in the west end of the church,
The night that Dunstan fled, the Devil skipped,
And with great laughter, in his roaring fashion,
Took up his O be joyful!

"The Divell was heard in the west end of the Church, taking up a great laughter after his roaring manner, as though he should show himself glad and joyful at Dunstan's going into exile.”—Holinshed, Chap. 23.

PAGE 228, ACT V., SCENE VII.

Stage Direction—“ In front is a mortstone.”

This was a large stone by the wayside, between a distant village and the Parish Church, on which the bearers of a dead body rested the coffin.

The picture of the past presents itself

Minute yet vivid, such as it is seen

In his last moments by a drowning man."

There are few psychological phenomena more interest

ing or more worthy of scientific investigation than the one here alluded to,-the presentation to a man in a drowning state,—and not as far as I am aware to a man dying in any other way, of innumerable acts and occurrences in a succession so rapid, that his whole life appears to be reflected in his last moments. There have been several examples of this in our own times, according to the relations of men who have been resuscitated out of a drowning state; and one of them is of such unquestionable authenticity and value that some claim may perhaps be advanced in the interest of Science to have it duly recorded.

THE END.

LONDON:

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.