or something of that kind; for the reason that no suicide has ever yet been known to drive a nail into his own head. That a wife might do so to her husband is _Chaucer's own_ statement; for, in the Cant. Tales, D. 765-770, we find-- 'Of latter date, of wives hath he red, That somme han slayn hir housbondes in hir bed ... And somme han drive nayles in hir brayn, Whyl that they slepte, and thus they han hem slayn.' Of course it may be said that l. 2006 is entirely _independent_ of l. 2007, and I have punctuated the text so as to suit this arrangement; but the suggestion is worth notice. 2011. From Tes. vii. 35:--'Videvi ancora l'allegro Furore.'--Kölbing. 2017. _hoppesteres._ Speght explains this word by pilots (_gubernaculum tenentes_); Tyrwhitt, female dancers (Ital. _ballatrice_). Others explain it _hopposteres_ = _opposteres_ = opposing, hostile, so that _schippes hoppesteres_ = _bellatrices carinae_ (Statius). As, however, it is impossible to suppose that even _opposteres_ without the _h_ can ever have been formed from the verb to _oppose_, the most likely solution is that Chaucer mistook the word _bellatrices_ in Statius (vii. 57) or the corresponding Ital. word _bellatrici_ in the Teseide, vii. 37, for _ballatrices_ or _ballatrici_, which might be supposed to mean 'female dancers'; an expression which would exactly correspond to an M. E. form _hoppesteres_, from the A. S. _hoppestre_, a female dancer. Herodias' daughter is mentioned (in the dative case) as _þære lyðran hoppystran_ (better spelt _hoppestran_) in Ælfric's A. S. Homilies, ed. Thorpe, i. 484. Hence _shippes hoppesteres_ simply means 'dancing ships.' Shakespeare likens the English fleet to 'A city on the inconstant billows _dancing_'; Hen. V. iii. prol. 15. Cf. O. F. _baleresse_, a female dancer, in Godefroy's Dict., s. v. _baleor_. In § 55 of Cl. Ptolomaei Centum Dicta, printed at Ulm in 1641, we are told that Mars is hostile to ships when in the zenith or the [81] eleventh house. '_Incendetur_ autem nauis, si ascendens ab aliqua stella fixa quae ex Martis mixtura sit, affligetur.' So that, if a fixed star co-operated with Mars, the ships were burnt. The following extract from Lewis' translation of Statius' Thebaid, bk. vii., is of some interest:--