nk-horns. It would be very easy
to multiply instances where the word is employed in our old writers. It
most frequently occurs in Wilson's "Rhetoric," where is inserted an
epistle composed of _ink-horn terms_; "suche a letter as Wylliam Sommer
himself could not make a better for that purpose. Some will thinke, and
swere it too, that there never was any suche thing written: well, I will
not force any man to beleve it, but I will saie thus much, and abyde by
it too, the like have been made heretofore, and praised above the
moone." It opens thus--

"Ponderying, expendying, and revolutying with myself, your urgent
affabilitee, and ingenious capacitee, for mundaine affaires, I cannot
but celebrate and extolle your magnificall dexteritee above all other;
for how could you have adopted such illustrate, prerogative, and
dominicall superioritee, if the fecunditee of your inginie had not been
so fertile and wonderfull pregnant?"--Fo. 86. edit. 1553. Wilson
elsewhere calls them "_ink-pot_ terms."

[114] [The popular idea at that time, and long afterwards, of
Machiavelli, arising from a misconception of his drift in "Il Principe."
See an article on this subject in Macaulay's "Essays."]

[115] [Old copy, _toucheth_, which may, of course, be right; but the
more probable word is that here substituted.]

[116] [The "Ebrietatis Encomium."]

[117] [Perhaps the "Image of Idleness," of which there was an edition in
1581. See Hazlitt's "Handbook," p. 291, and ibid. Suppl.]

[118] Nash alludes to a celebrated burlesque poem by Francisco Copetta,
entitled (in the old collection of productions of the kind, made in
1548, and many times afterwards reprinted), "Capitolo nel quale si
lodano le Noncovelle." Some of the thoughts in Rochester's well-known
piece seem taken from it. A notion of the whole may be formed from the
following translation of four of the _terze rime_--

"_Nothing_ is brother to primaeval matter,
'Bout which philosophers their brains may batter
To find it out, but still their hopes they flatter.

"Its virtue is most wondrously display'd,
For in the Bible, we all know, 'tis said,
God out of _nothing_ the creation made.

"Yet _nothing_ has nor head, tail, back, nor shoulder,
And tho' than the great _Dixit_ it is older,
Its strength is such, that all things first shall moulder.

"The rank of _nothing_ we from this may see:
The mighty Roman once declared that he
Caesar o