“_Hair_ is here used in what has become quite an obsolete sense.
The meaning is outward form, nature, or character. The word used to
be by no means uncommon; but it is now, as was before remarked, out
of fashion; and indeed I do not think that it is found even in any
old writer used exactly in the way in which Lovelace has employed
it.”
We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands it! Did he never hear of
the golden hair of Apollo,--of the _intonsum Cynthium_? Don Quixote was
a better scholar where he speaks of _las doradas hebras de sus hermosos
cabellos_. But _hair_ never meant what Mr. Hazlitt says it does, even
when used as he supposes it to be here. It had nothing to do with
“outward form, nature, or character,” but had a meaning much nearer what
we express by temperament, which its color was and is thought to
indicate.
On p. 232 “_wild_ ink” is explained to mean “_unrefined_.” It is a mere
misprint for “_vild_.”
Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an illusion of Lovelace to the “east
and west” in speaking of George Sandys, mentions Sandys’s Oriental
travels, but seems not to know that he translated Ovid in Virginia.