3877. _nayl_, a hindrance; like a nail that holds a box from being opened, or that catches a man's clothes, and holds him back. 3878. 'E quegli che contro alla mia età parlando vanno, mostra mal che conoscano che, perchè il porro abbia il capo blanco, che la coda sia verde'; and, as for those that go speaking about my age, it shews that they ill understand how, although the leek has a white head, its tail (or blade) is green; Boccaccio, Decamerone; introduction to the Fourth Day. So also in Northward Ho, by Dekker and Webster, Act iv. sc. 1: 'garlic has a white head and a green stalk'; where Dyce remarks that it occurs again in The Honest Lawyer, 1616, sig. G 2. Cf. P. Plowman, B. xiii. 352. 3878-82. Compare Alanus de Insulis, Parabolae, cap. I (in Leyser's collection, p. 1067):-- 'Extincti cineres, si ponas sulphura, uiuent; Sic uetus apposita mente calescit amor.' [114] 3882. For _olde_, T. has _cold_, I cannot guess why: smouldering ashes are more likely to be hot. _Old ashes_ mean ashes left after a fire has died down, in which, if raked together, fire can be long preserved. 'Still, in our old ashes, is fire collected.' See the parallel passage in Troilus, ii. 538. In Soliman and Persida (Dodsley's Old Plays, ed. Hazlitt, v. 339) we find:-- 'as the fire That lay, with honour's hand raked up in ashes, Revives again to flames.' We are reminded of line 92 in Gray's Elegy:--'Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires'; but Gray himself tells us that he was thinking, not of Chaucer, but of Sonnet 169 (170) of Petrarch:-- 'Ch'i veggio nel pensier, dolce mio fuoco, Fredda una lingua e due begli occhi chiusi, Rimaner doppo noi pien di faville'-- i. e. which (love-songs) I see in thought, O my sweet flame, when (my) one tongue is cold, and (your) two fine eyes are closed, remaining after us, full of sparkles. _y-reke_, raked or heaped together, collected. Not explained by Wright or Morris; Tyrwhitt explains it by 'smoking,' and takes it to be a _present_ participle, which is impossible. It is the pt. t. of the scarce strong verb _reken_, pt. t. _rak_, pp. _y-reken_, _y-reke_, of which the primary notion was to 'gather together.' It occurs, just once, in Gothic, in the translation of Romans, xii. 20: 'haurja funins _rikis_ ana haubith is,' i. e. coals of fire shalt thou heap together on his head. It is the very verb from which the sb. _rake_ is derived. See _Rake_ in my Etym. Dict., and the G. _Rechen_ in Kluge. The notion is taken from the heaping together of smouldering ashes to preserve the fire within. Lydgate copies this image in his Siege of Troye, ed. 1555, fol. B 4:-- 'But inward brent of hate and of enuy The hoote fyre, and yet there was no smeke [smoke], So couertly the malyce was _yreke_.'