45. Gladiators armed with a net and a noose respectively (cf. above, p. 336, note 17).
46. One of the Lipari Islands, Hiera, was Vulcan’s abode.
47. Ephesians 6.13–17. Cf. above, p. 70, note 47.
48. Spiritual beings thought to have ruled the celestial spheres.
49. Ecstasy.
50. See above, p. 66, note 26.
51. See above, p. 31.
52. i.e. the words inscribed on it during Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5.5–28).
53. Unrevealed.
54. i.e. novelty.
55. ‘This was the answer made by Diogenes to Alexander, who asked him what he had to request’ (SJ). So Plutarch, Alexander, XIV.
56. ‘Severe, hard, sowre’ (Cockeram).
57. i.e. measurement.
58. ‘The book in which the Census, or account of every man’s estate, was registered among the Romans’ (SJ).
59. See above, pp. 28 and 51.
60. Cf. above, p. 133: ‘at the sight of a Toad, or Viper, I finde in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them’.
61. Cf. above, p. 152: ‘I ground upon experience, that poysons containe within themselves their owne Antidote’.
62. Gold (see below, p. 529: Ophir).
63. Seminal principles (as above, p. 374, note 53).
64. i.e. the man created according to the Idea in the mind of God (above, p. 30). An earlier version of this passage in one of Browne’s commonplace books reads: ‘Could wee intimately apprehend the ideated man and as it primitively stood in the intellect of god upon the first exertion by creation, wee might more narrowlie apprehend our degeneration; & how widely wee are fallen from the pure exemplar & Idea of ourselves’ (K, III, 293).
65. Attendant spirit (see below, note 67).
66. i.e. intervening occurrences.
67. ‘Socrates, and Cardan, perhaps, in imitation of him, talked of an attendant spirit or genius, that hinted from time to time how they should act’ (SJ).
68. Turnings back and turnings aside (M).
69. i.e. the Dead Sea, called lacus asphaltites because of the bitumen floating on its surface. Cf. Milton’s ‘Asphaltic Pool’ (Paradise Lost, I, 411).
70. ‘sodaynly’ (Elyot).
71. Iliad, I, 592.
72. Course, tendency.
73. So Juvenal – ‘speaking of the confluence of foreigners to Rome’ (SJ) – in Satires, III, 62.
74. i.e. small star.
75. ‘The motion of the heart, which beats about sixty times in a minute; or, perhaps, the motion of respiration, which is nearer to the number mentioned’ (SJ).
76. Customary (E).
77. Proverbs 22.13: ‘The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets’.
78. In his pursuit of the hind of Keryneia.
79. ‘Speed, haste’ (Cockeram).
80. ‘Slackness’ (tockeram).
81. ‘This blackhearted fellow’ (Browne marg., quoting in Latin the full line of Horace, Satires, I, iv, 85).
82. ‘the term by which the antient theatrical performers solicited a clap’ (SJ).
83. ‘As Socrates did. Athens a place of Learning and Civility’ (Browne marg.). In Socrates’s praise of the Athenians (Xenophon, Memorabilia, III, V, 3).
84. ‘Astræa Goddess of Justice and consequently of all Virtue’ (Browne marg.).
85. The one wrote mostly of warriors; the other, of philosophers (SJ).
86. Like M. Scaevola (below, p. 532).
1. ‘Jupiter’s brain’: ‘Cerebrum Jovis, for a Delicious bit’ (Browne marg.). ‘Cytheridian cheese’: the cheese of the island of Cythnus (?). ‘Tongues of Nightingals’: ‘A dish used among the luxurious of antiquity’ (SJ).
2. ‘Metellus his riotous Pontifical Supper, the great variety whereat is to be seen in Macrobius’ (Browne marg.): Saturnalia, III, xiii, 10 ff.
3. ‘Nero in his flight’: Suetonius, Nero, XLVIII, 4 (Browne marg.).
4. ‘Tepid water, with which the ancients tempered their wine’ (apud G1). So Juvenal, Satires, V, 63 (Browne marg.).
5. Gluttons.
6. i.e. contentments.
7. Cf. above, p. 411, note 104.
8. Favourably disposed (OED; M).
9. Zoilus: ‘a poete, whych envied Homerus: and therefore the enviers of well lerned men are called Zoil’ (Elyot, in §176).
10. No longer extant; but the mistake is reported by Aulus Gellius.
11. ‘In Tabula Smaragdina’ (Browne marg.). The words from the ‘Smaragdine Table’ (as above, p. 74, note 71) mean: ‘It is true, certainly true, true in the highest degree’ (SJ).
12. Structure (cf. above, p. 250, note 3).
13. Scholastically. ‘A “quodlibet” was a question in philosophy or theology proposed for scholastic disputation’ (SCR).
14. i.e. like the ambiguous oracular pronouncements at Delphi.
15. ‘The vena basilica in the arm, one of the veins opened in bloodletting’ (M).
16. ‘a membrane or thin skin, involving the whole heart, like a case’ (Blount).
17. Uncertain.
18. ‘On which the Sibyl wrote her oracular answers’ (SJ).
19. Leafy.
20. i.e. acquisitions.
21. Previous estimation.
22. The Emperor Tiberius used to exercise his grammarians by demanding the name of Hecuba’s mother. See also above, p. 307, note 13.
23. ‘Lewis the Eleventh: “He who knows not how to dissemble knows not how to reign” ’ (Browne marg., quoted in Latin).
24. ‘quiddities; from the Lat. (Ergo) a word much used in Syllogisms’ (Blount).
25. Used in the pejorative sense, unlike its use in Religio Medici to describe the art of God (above, p. 81).
26. ‘Forcible eruption’ (SJ).
27. As above, p. 184, note 49.
28. Cf. the proverb ‘Truth lies at the bottom of a well’ (M).
29. As above, p. 66, note 28.
30. ‘I myself (for I well remember it) at the time of the Trojan war was Euphorbus, son of Panthous’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 160–61.)
31. The universe, commonly assumed to have been created in about 4000 B.C., was expected to terminate by the year A.D. 2000 – a period usually divided into Three Eras of 2,000 years each, in accordance with the ‘prophecy’ of the ‘school of Elijah’ (Sanhedrin, 97a-b, in The Babylonian Talmud, ed. I. Epstein [1935], Sanh. II). See §97.
32. ‘Who comforted himself that he should there converse with the old Philosophers’ (Browne marg.). So Cicero, On Old Age, LXXXIV.
33. i.e. assays: attempts.
34. Mandelslo (Browne marg.) reported in his Travels (trans. 1662) that the inhabitants of Capo Verde ‘believe the dead will rise again, but that they shall be white, and trade as the Europeans do’ (SCR; M).
35. ‘Our first day fixed our last’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Seneca, Oedipus, 988).
36. Agreement – i.e. with Abraham (Genesis 18.20–32).
37. ‘Defiled’ (SJ).
38. ‘obstinacy’ (Blount).
39. in coagulato: ‘in a congealed or compressed mass’; in soluto: ‘in a state of expansion and separation’ (SJ).
40. As above, p. 410, note 99.
41. ‘that is, in the first part of our time, alluding to the four quadratures of the moon’ (SJ).
42. The one was reduced to poverty on having his eyes put out, the other while in captivity was placed in an iron cage. ‘It may somewhat gratify those who deserve to be gratified, to inform them that both these stories are FALSE’ (SJ).
43. ‘amuse’ (1716 ed.): ‘amaze’ (MSS.). But the former can also mean the latter (E).
44. ‘Sight is made… by Extramission, by receiving the rayes of the object into the eye, and not by sending any out’ (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, III, 7).
45. i.e. direct contact.
46. i.e. admonitions.
47. i.e. for our salvation.
48.
Revelation 20.14: ‘death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. And this is the second death’. Cf. above, p. 313, note 46.
49. Magnifying glasses.
50. i.e. Charles II.
51. ‘strift’ or striving (as above, p. 393): ‘shift’ (1716 ed.).
52. As above, p. 155, note 112.
53. ‘Spare me from shipwreck; then death will be a boon’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Ovid, Tristia, I, ii, 52).
54. Cf. above, p. 271: ‘the old Heroes in Homer, dreaded nothing more than water or drowning’.
55. So Plutarch, Themistocles, XXXI (Browne marg.).
56. Phaedo, 117–18.
57. ‘Pummel, wherein he is said to have carried something, whereby upon a struggle or despair he might deliver himself from all misfortunes’ (Browne marg.).
58. Odyssey, V, 47–8: ‘the staff, with which [Hermes] mazes the eyes of those mortals whose eyes he would maze, or wakes again the sleepers’.
59. The murder of Ibrahim Pasha by Suleiman the Magnificent is related by Knolles (Browne marg.).
60. ‘Agonies’ (SJ).
1. i.e. satires (see above, p. 408, note 96).
2. Man’s first disobedience, according to Milton’s theological treatise, encompasses distrust, sacrilege, deceit, ingratitude, gluttony, and so on (Works, Columbia ed., XV, 181–3).
3. Implacable.
4. ‘lasting sufferance’ (as above, p. 177).
5. i.e. during Noah’s Flood.
6. Long-lived.
7. Methuselah was born before Adam died, and died after Noah was born.
8. Isaiah 14.12–15, where the reference to the King of Babylon was traditionally understood to apply to Satan.
9. Salmoneus in Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 585–6 (SJ).
10. i.e. exsuperances: ‘exaggerations’ (SJ).
11. See above, p. 26.
12. Offering two courses.
13. Luminously.
14. ‘A straight line is the shortest [i.e. most direct distance between two points]’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of the proverbial utterance derived from Euclid).
15. As above, p. 74, note 69.
16. ‘bonye, or of a bone’ (Elyot).
17. The Seven Deadly Sins, here associated with the passage across the Styx (as above, p. 301, note 23), in turn related to the Nile with the obvious implications of God’s judgements against the Egyptians.
18. As above, p. 125, note 324.
19. ‘Arbor Goa or ficus Indica, whose branches send down shoots which root in the ground, from whence there successively rise others, till one Tree becomes a wood’ (Browne marg.). Milton’s similar reference to the Indian fig-tree (Paradise Lost, IX, 1101–12) was doubtless adapted from its celebrated description by Ralegh (pp. 137–8).
20. Displeasures with (as above, p. 411, note 104).
21. ’Eπιχαιρɛκακíα (Browne marg.). The vice is malignant delight at another’s misfortune (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, vi, 18, and vii 15).
22. Dark; also malignant (below, note 24).
23. ‘deaf’ (Blount).
24. Sirius – ‘the swart Star’ of Milton’s Lycidas (l. 138: cf. above, note 22) – under whose malign influence vegetation was said to wither.
25. ‘Sapiens dominabitur Astris’ (Browne marg.): a proverb, translated in the text.
26. ‘Adam thought to be created in the State of Man, about thirty years Old’ (Browne marg.). Cf. above, p. 109: ‘Some Divines count Adam 30 yeares old at his creation’.
27. ‘Of one time and age’ (Cockeram).
28. Company.
29. ‘Attalus made a Garden which contained only venemous Plants’ (Browne marg.). Cf. above, p. 328.
30. Like Theseus, who on returning home forgot to change his black sails to white, and so caused the suicide of his father Aegeus.
31. i.e. medieval scholastic theologians (cf. above, p. 69, note 39).
32. Daniel 4.32.
33. i.e. with the ever-present God.
34. As above, p. 263, note 2.
35. ‘Don Sebastian de Covarrubias writ 3 Centuries [i.e. three hundred] of moral Emblems in Spanish. In the 88th of the second Century he sets down two Faces averse, and conjoined Janus-like, the one a Gallant Beautiful Face, the other a Death’s Head Face, with this Motto out of Ovid’s Metamorphosis [II, 551], Quid fuerim quid simque vide’ – i.e. ‘See what I used to be and what I am now’ (Browne marg.).
36. ‘attaining’ (Blount).
37. Diminishes.
38. i.e. inadvertence: inattention.
39. Cf. above, p. 425, note 32.
40. Impediments.
41. i.e. in rings.
42. i.e. the Black Sea.
43. i.e. ‘with shadows all round us. The Periscii are those, who, living within the polar circle, see the sun move round them, and consequently project their shadows in all directions’ (SJ).
44. i.e. coarse. The wondrous Colossus of Rhodes is described by Pliny, XXXIV, 18.
45. CF. Matthew 13.45: ‘the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant-man seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it’.
46. ‘A Book so entituled wherein are sundry horrid accounts’ (Browne marg.). It was published in 1597.
47. Like the tyrants in the stories related by Seneca (On Anger, III, 40) and Diogenes Laertius (Lives, IX, 10), respectively.
48. i.e. iniquitous in commutative fashion. The phrase is opposed to ‘commutative justice’ (see above, p. 157, note 117).
49. 1 Samuel 20.20.
50. As above, p. 293, note 70.
51. ‘You may shout so as to outdo Stentor, or at least as loudly as Homer’s Mars’ (Browne marg., quoting the Latin of Juvenal, Satires, XIII, 112–13). Cf. Iliad, V, 785 and 858.
52. ‘A soft Tongue breaketh the bones’ (Browne marg.): Proverbs 25.15.
53. Pertaining to Caesar. Cf. above, p. 402, note 64.
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