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."

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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:

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"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.

In the Under

P. 13. Powder-corns shot at the artillery-yard.]
woods, 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."

At the time of writing the Alchemist, however, the ground was reserved for the practice of the royal gunners of the Tower, and the company which still exists was then only in course of formation. The "powder-corns" on which the Woolwich Infants of 1874 are fed, are about twenty times the size of the "black and melancholie worms " of 1610.

P. 14. A felt of rug,] i. e. a hat made of the coarsest description of drugget. A felt came to be synonymous with a hat, just as a beaver was till recently:

"A faire cloke on his backe, and on his head a felt."

Thynne's Debate between Pride and Lowliness.

P. 14. Letting out of counters.] These counters were generally of metal. There is a curious story told by Lord Lumley to the Earl of Shrewsbury, that in 1605, when there was great rejoicing at the Spanish Embassy on account of the birth of Philip IV., some wits contrived to throw " counters" among the crowd to bring discredit on Spanish liberality.

P. 15. No, you scarab.] See the notes on this word, vol. ii. p. 465.

P. 15. Giv'n thee thy oaths,] i. e. Initiated him in swearing, after the fashion of Bobadill, in the form proper to the science of alchemy.

P. 15. Never been known, past equi clibanum,

The heat of horse-dung.] Clibanus, says Cooper, 1587, is "a furneise, a stillatorie."

A face cut for thee

P. 17. Worse than Gamaliel Ratsey's.] The tract referred to in Note (9) has been reprinted by Mr. Collier, in vol. iii. of his Illustrations of Old English Literature. The authority on which Gifford stated that Gamaliel Ratsey robbed in a mask has never been discovered. The only copy known of this amusing tract is without a title-page. It belonged to Malone, who states in a note that he had heard of an engraved portrait prefixed to the book, but he had never seen it. I can find no trace of it either in Bromley or Grainger. Ratsey was executed at Bedford, March 26, 1605.

P. 19. Away, this brach.] Gifford's own note to which he refers should be inserted here: "A brache is a female hound. It is strange to see what quantities of paper have been wasted in confounding the sense of this plain word. The pages of Shakspeare and Jonson and Fletcher are incumbered with endless quotations,

which generally leave the reader as ignorant as they found him. One, however, which has escaped the commentators, at least the material part of it, is worth all that they have advanced on the word. The Gentleman's Recreation, p. 28: 'There are in England and Scotland two kinds of hunting dogs, and no where else in the world: the first kind is called a rache, and this is a foot-scenting creature both of wilde beastes, birds, and fishes also, which lie hid among the rocks. The female hereof in England is called a brache; a brache is A MANNERLY NAME for all hound-bitches.' And when we add for all others, it will surely be allowed that enough has been said on the subject." Gifford's Massinger, vol. i. p. 211.

P. 19. The statute of sorcery.] The old statute of 1403, against alchemy, had the singular merit of being, according to Lord Coke, "the shortest act of Parliament he had ever met with." Here is the whole of it: "None from henceforth shall use to multiply gold or silver, or use the craft of multiplication, and if any the same do, he shall incur the pain of felony." This statute remained in full force till 1689, when it was repealed by the interest of the celebrated Robert Boyle, who is said to have thought that he himself had discovered the art, and wished to be able to follow it up with safety! See Bishop Watson's Chemical Essays, vol. i. p. 24. The folio of course has Harry the Eight, the universal custom of the time, which it is a pity not to preserve in the text.

P. 19. Laundring gold and barbing it.] These terms were both borrowed from the barber's shop. We should now call the processes lathering and shaving. So late as Butler's time we read of beards being

"Pruned, and starched, and lander'd,

And cut square by the Russian standard."

P. 20. Stage direction: Dashes Subtle's vial out of his hand.] In place of this and the preceding direction snatches Face's sword, we have in the folio, "Shee catcheth out Face his sword; and breakes Subtles glasse." This leads me to doubt the correctness of Gifford's stage direction at p. 11, of "Enter Face with his sword drawn." He was not of the sword-drawing class, and how much it adds to the energy of Dol, the true hero of the three, to represent her snatching the sword out of the scabbard as it hung by Face's side, and dashing the "glasse" to pieces in Subtle's hand!

P. 20. For ne'er a snarling dog-bolt of you both.] "Of this word," says Samuel Johnson, “I know not the meaning, unless it be that when meal or flour is sifted or bolted to a certain degree the coarser part is called dog-bolt, or flour for dogs." I doubt this. In Jonson's time mills were not so powerful as they have since