20. Proined: or “pruned;” carefully trimmed and dressed
himself. The word is used in falconry of a hawk when she picks
and trims her feathers.
21. A dogge for the bow: a dog attending a hunter with the
bow.
22 The Romance of the Rose: a very popular mediaeval
romance, the English version of which is partly by Chaucer. It
opens with a description of a beautiful garden.
23. Priapus: Son of Bacchus and Venus: he was regarded as
the promoter of fertility in all agricultural life, vegetable and
animal; while not only gardens, but fields, flocks, bees — and
even fisheries — were supposed to be under his protection.
24. Argus was employed by Juno to watch Io with his hundred
eyes but he was sent to sleep by the flute of Mercury, who then
cut off his head.
25. “My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my
fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is
over and gone: The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the
singing of the birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard
in our land.”
— Song of Solomon, ii. 10-12.
26. “That fair field,
Of Enna, where Proserpine, gath’ring flowers,
Herself a fairer flow’r, by gloomy Dis
Was gather’d.”
— Milton, Paradise Lost, iv. 268
27. “Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one
by one, to find out the account:
Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man amongst a
thousand have I found, but a woman among all those I have not
found.
Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright.”
Ecclesiastes vii. 27-29.
28. Jesus, the son of Sirach, to whom is ascribed one of the
books of the Apochrypha — that called the “Wisdom of Jesus
the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus;” in which, especially in the
ninth and twenty-fifth chapters, severe cautions are given
against women.
29. Roman gestes: histories; such as those of Lucretia, Porcia,
&c.
30. May means January to believe that she is pregnant, and that
she has a craving for unripe pears.
31. At this point, and again some twenty lines below, several
verses of a very coarse character had been inserted in later
manuscripts; but they are evidently spurious, and are omitted in
the best editions.
32. “Store” is the general reading here, but its meaning is not
obvious. “Stowre” is found in several manuscripts; it signifies
“struggle” or “resist;” and both for its own appropriateness, and
for the force which it gives the word “stronge,” the reading in
the text seems the better.