“Whom thou in triumph long Hast prisoner held, fetter’d in amorous chains, And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus.” And still more clearly is the application made, _1 Henry VI._ (act iv. sc. 3, l. 17, vol. v. p. 71), when Sir William Lucy thus urges York,— “Thou princely leader of our English strength, Never so needful on the earth of France, Spur to the rescue of the noble Talbot, Who now is girdled with a waist of iron And hemm’d about with grim destruction:” and at York’s inability, through “the vile traitor Somerset,” to render aid, Lucy laments (l. 47, p. 72),— “Thus, while the vulture of sedition Feeds in the bosoms of such great commanders, Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss The conquest of our scarce cold conqueror, That ever living man of memory, Henry the Fifth.” It may readily be supposed that in writing these passages Shakespeare had in memory, or even before him, the delineations which are given of Prometheus, for the vulture feeding on the heart belongs to them all, and the allusion is exactly one of those which arises from a casual glance at a scene or picture without dwelling on details. This casual glance indeed seems to have been the way in which our Dramatist appropriated others of the Emblem sketches. In the well-known quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius, in _Julius Cæsar_ (act iv. sc. 3, l. 21, vol. vii. p. 389), Brutus demands,— “What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world But for supporting robbers, shall we now Contaminate our fingers with base bribes, And sell the mighty space of our large honours For so much trash as may be grasped thus? I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, Than such a Roman.” The expression is the perfect counterpart of Alciat’s 164th Emblem (p. 571, edition Antwerp, 1581); the motto, copied by Whitney (p. 213), is, _Inanis impetus_,—“A vain attack.” “By night, as at a mirror, the dog looks at the lunar orb: And seeing himself, believes another dog to be on high, And barks: but in vain is his angry voice driven by winds, The silent Diana ever onward goes in her course.”[132] The device engraved on Alciat’s and Whitney’s pages depicts the full moon surrounded by stars, and a large dog baying. Whitney’s stanzas give the meaning of Alciat's, and also of Beza's, which follow below,—