Line 195. _Seven yeares I was a woman._--The blindness of Tiresias is most frequently ascribed, either to his having, when a child, revealed the secrets of the gods, or to his having gazed upon Athenè bathing, on which occasion the goddess is said to have deprived him of sight. Another tradition, however (adhered to by Ovid, _Met._ iii. 516, etc.), relates that Tiresias beheld two serpents together; he struck at them, and, happening to kill the female, was himself changed into a woman. Seven years later he again encountered two serpents, but now killed the male, and resumed the shape of man. Zeus and Hera, disputing over the relative happiness of man and woman, referred the matter to Tiresias, as having a practical knowledge of both conditions. He favoured Zeus's assertion that a woman possessed the more enjoyments; whereupon Hera, indignant, blinded him, while Zeus bestowed on him, in compensation, the power of prophecy. Line 197. _Fold._--The omission of a prefix to suit the exigencies of metre, common enough in verbs such as defend, defile, becomes remarkable when the force of the prefix itself is such as to change entirely the meaning of the verb. Examples of omission in such cases are comparatively rare, but they are not confined to our own language. See Vergil, _Aen._ i. 262-- "Longius et volvens fatorum arcana movebo"-- and cf. also _Aen._ v. 26, and Cicero's _Brutus_, 87. Line 223. _Catch audacitye._--For the old metaphorical use of catch cf. Wyclif's Bible (1 Tim. vi. 12), "Catche euerlastyng lyf." Line 227. _Curromanstike_, chiromantic, _i.e._ pertaining to chiromancy; the rhyme being probably responsible for the use of the adjective rather than the noun. Line 229. _The table_, etc.--"The table-line, or line of fortune, begins under the mount of Mercury, and ends near the index and middle finger.... When lines come from the mount of Venus, and cut the line of life, it denotes the party unfortunate in love and business, and threatens him with some suddain death" (_The True Fortune-teller, or Guide to Knowledge_, 1686). Line 236. _Sheppbiter._--A malicious, surly fellow; according to Dyce, "a cant term for a thief." See _Twelfth Night_, ii. 5, 6, "The niggardly, rascally sheep-biter." Line 246. _What._--MS. has the abbreviation w^{th}, usually denoting _with_, but evidently substituted here, by a copyist's error, for w^{t} = _what_. Line 247. _They can but bring_, etc.--W. Carew Hazlitt (_English Proverbs_, p. 28) quotes from Heywood, 1562--"A man maie well bring a horse to the water, but he can not make him drinke without he will." He also mentions that the proverb is ascribed (probably falsely) to Queen Elizabeth, in the _Philosopher's Banquet_ (1614). Line 261. _I_ = ay.--Both spellings occur in the MS. For the common use of the capital _I_ in this sense, see Juliet's play upon the word--