[108] As usual, Nash has here misquoted, or the printer has omitted a word. Virgil's line is-- "_Fama malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum_." --"Aeneid," iv. 174. Gabriel Harvey, replying in 1597, in his "Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman" (written in the name of Richard Litchfield, the barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge), also alludes to this commonplace: "The virtuous riches wherewith (as broad-spread fame reporteth) you are endued, though _fama malum_ (as saith the poet) which I confirm," &c. Perhaps this was because Nash had previously employed it, or it might be supposed that the barber would have been unacquainted with it. [109] A soldier of this sort, or one pretending to be a soldier, is a character often met with in our old comedies, such as Lieutenant Maweworm and Ancient Hautboy in "A Mad World, my Masters," Captain Face in "Ram-Alley," &c. [110] [_Dii minores_.] [111] Pedlar's French was another name for the cant language used by vagabonds. What pedlars were may be judged from the following description of them in "The Pedlar's Prophecy," a comedy printed in 1595, but obviously written either very early in the reign of Elizabeth, or perhaps even in that of her sister-- "I never knew honest man of this occupation. But either he was a dycer, a drunkard, a maker of shift, A picker, or cut-purse, a raiser of simulation, Or such a one as run away with another man's wife." [112] [Old copy, _by_.] [113] _Ink-horn_ is a very common epithet of contempt for pedantic and affected expressions. The following, from Churchyard's "Choice," sig. E e 1., sets it in its true light-- "As _Ynkehorne_ termes smell of the schoole sometyme." It went out of use with the disuse of ink-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."]