ng off._

_Pleas._ Your hand, sweet moiety.

_Wood._ And heart too, my comfortable importance.
Mistress and wife, by turns, I have possessed:
He, who enjoys them both in one, is blessed.

Footnotes:
1. The Mahommedan doctrine of predestination is well known. They
reconcile themselves to all dispensations, by saying, "They are
written on the forehead" of him, to whose lot they have fallen.

2. The custom of drinking _supernaculum_, consisted in turning down
the cup upon the thumb-nail of the drinker after his pledge, when,
if duly quaffed off, no drop of liquor ought to appear upon his
nail.

With that she set it to her nose,
And off at once the rumkin goes;
No drops beside her muzzle falling,
Until that she had supped it all in:
Then turning't topsey on her thumb,
Says--look, here's _supernaculum._
_Cotton's Virgil travestie._

This custom seems to have been derived from the Germans, who held,
that if a drop appeared on the thumb, it presaged grief and
misfortune to the person whose health was drunk.

3. This piece of dirty gallantry seems to have been fashionable:

Come, Phyllis, thy finger, to begin the go round;
How the glass in thy hand with charms does abound!
You and the wine to each other lend arms,
And I find that my love
Does for either improve,
For that does redouble, as you double your charms.

4. Dapper, a silly character in Jonson's Alchemist, tricked by an
astrologer, who persuades him the queen of fairies is his aunt.

5. The mask, introduced in the first act of the Maid's Tragedy, ends
with the following dialogue betwixt Cinthia and Night:

_Cinthia_ Whip up thy team,
The day breaks here, and yon sun-flaring beam
Shot from the south. Say, which way wilt thou go?

_Night._ I'll vanish into mists.

_Cinthia._ I into day.

6. In spring 1677, whilst the treaty of Nimeguen was under discussion,
the French took the three important frontier towns, Valenciennes,
St Omer, and Cambray. The Spaniards seemed, with the most passive
infatuation, to have left the defence of Flanders to the Prince of
Orange and the Dutch.

7. Alluding to the imaginary history of Pine, a merchant's clerk, who,
being wrecked on a desert island in the South Seas, bestowed on it
his own name, and peopled it by the assistance of his ma