[26] The following passage in Gabriel Harvey's "New Letter of Notable Contents, 1593," speaking of Nash, confirms the conjecture that _Falantado_ or _Falanta_ was the burden of a song or ballad at the time:--"Let him be the _Falanta_ down-diddle of rhyme, the hayhohaliday of prose, the welladay of new writers, and the cutthroat of his adversaries." [27] The hobby-horse was a basket-horse used in morris-dances and May games. See note 37 to Greene's "Tu Quoque." [28] [Hall, the taborer, mentioned in "Old Meg of Herefordshire," 1609. See the reprint in "Miscellanea Antiqua Anglicana," 1816.] [29] A vulgar colloquialism for laying a girl on the grass. [30] He ran in debt to this amount to usurers, who advanced him money by giving him _lute-strings and grey paper_; which he was obliged to sell at an enormous loss. There is a very apposite passage in Nash's "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," 1593, where he is referring to the resort of spendthrifts and prodigals to usurers for supplies: In the first instance, they obtain what they desire, "but at the second time of their coming, it is doubtful to say whether they shall have money or no: the world grows hard, and we are all mortal: let them make him any assurance before a judge, and they shall have some hundred pounds (_per consequence_) in silks and velvets. The third time if they come, they have baser commodities: the fourth time _lute-strings and grey paper_; and then, I pray pardon me, I am not for you: pay me that you owe me, and you shall have anything." So also in Greene's and Lodge's "Looking Glass for London and England," 1594, a gentleman thus addresses a usurer, in hopes of inducing him to relent: "I pray you, sir, consider that my loss was great by the commodity I took up: you know, sir, I borrowed of you forty pounds, whereof I had ten pounds in money, and thirty pounds in _lute-strings_, which when I came to sell again, I could get but five pounds for them." [31] Some case of horse-stealing, which had lately taken place, and which had attracted public attention. [32] See Collier's "Bibliogr. Catal.," ii. 512. Extr. from Stat. Reg., i. 184, and a woodcut in his "Book of Roxburghe Ballads," 1847, p. 103. [33] The title of an old ballad. Compare Collier's "Extr. from Stationers' Registers," i. 7, 19, and Rimbault's "Book of Songs and Ballads," p. 83. [34] The words of Aulus Gellius are these: "Neque mihi," inquit. "aedificatio, neque vasum, neque vestimentum ullum est manupreciosum, neque preciosus servus, neque ancilla est: si quid est," inquit, "quod utar, utor: si non est, egeo: suum cuique per me uti atque frui licet." Tum deinde addit: "Vitio vertunt, quia multa egeo; at ego illis quia nequeunt egere."--Noct. Attic., lib. xiii. c. 23. [35] Ovid "Rem. Am." l. 749.