16 The two kinds of law which Hooker (as he indicates at the beginning of this extract) has already dealt with are: the law which binds a man's private conscience, and the law which regulates his dealings with the state (or 'politic society') of which he is a member. _conceits_=conceptions. 18 _But that is a wisdom_: i.e. the wisdom of wise men, who know how to make a proper use of their studies. _distilled books_: i.e. books of selections and extracts. _Abeunt studia, etc_.: 'studies pass into the character.' _stond_= impediment. 19 _bowling_, i.e. playing bowls. _schoolmen_: the theological and metaphysical writers of the middle ages. _Cymini sectores_: 'splitters of cumin-seed,' i.e. what we should call 'hair-splitters,' the seed of the cumin (a plant something like fennel) being very minute. 20 _In the universality of the kind, etc_.: i.e. the race endures, the individual perishes. 24 _Lycosthenes_, a German scholar of the sixteenth century, wrote a commentary on a book of _Lives of eminent men_, a work attributed to Pliny the younger (first century A.D.). 26 _The eighth climate_: i.e. England, which lies in the eighth of the zones (or 'climates') into which the old geographers divided the globe. _constellated_: i.e. born under a particular 'constellation' or conjunction of planets (an astrological expression). _Hydra_: the many-headed monster slain by Hercules. _in casting account_=in doing sums. 27 _Doradoes_=rich men; a Spanish word, as in the phrase 'El dorado' ('the rich country'). _First, when a city, etc_.: the skeleton of this highly involved sentence is as follows: 'First, when a city shall be as it were besieged. . ., that then the people . . . should be disputing. . ., argues first a singular good will. . ., and from thence derives itself [i.e. flows on, proceeds] to a gallant bravery. . . .' 28 _as his was who when Rome, etc_.: this story is told by Livy, as an instance of the undaunted spirit of the Romans during the Punic war. _mewing_ properly means 'moulting.' Milton apparently uses it in the sense of 'renewing by the process of moulting.' 29 _engrossers_: wholesale buyers; here used metaphorically of those who, by curtailing the liberty of book-printing, would 'buy up' the stock of knowledge and dole it out as they thought fit. 30 _he who takes up arms for coat and conduct_: this refers to Charles I's exaction of a tax for the clothing and conducting (i.e. conveying) of troops. _his four nobles of Danegelt_: a noble was a coin worth 6s. 8d. Danegelt was originally the land-tax raised by Ethelred the Unready to buy off the Danes; the word was afterwards used of any unpopular tax, here of Charles I's imposition of ship-money, resisted by Hampden. _In this unhappy battle_: the battle of Newbury, Sept. 20, 1643, in which the advantage was on the whole with the King against the Roundheads. 33 _vacant_: i.e. open, unclouded.