“Why come you not? what! multitudes, and fear? _Clif._ So cowards fight, when they can fly no further. So doves do peck the falcon’s piercing talons.” The queen entreats Clifford, “for a thousand causes,” to withhold his arm, and Northumberland joins in the entreaty,— “_North._ Hold, Clifford! do not honour him so much, To prick thy finger, though to wound his heart: What valour were it, when a cur doth grin, For one to thrust his hand between his teeth, When he might spurn him with his foot away?” Clifford and Northumberland seize York, who struggles against them (l. 61),— “_Clif._ Ay, ay, so strives the woodcock with the gin.[147] _North._ So doth the cony struggle in the net.” York is taken prisoner, as he says (l. 63),— “So triumph thieves upon their conquer’d booty; So true men yield, with robbers so o’ermatch’d.” The four or five notions or sayings here enunciated a designer or engraver could easily translate into as many Emblematical devices, and the mind which uses them, as naturally as if he had invented them, must surely have had some familiarity with the kind of writing of which proverbs are the main source and foundation. In this connection we will quote the proverb which “Clifford of Cumberland” (_2 Henry VI._, act v. sc. 2, l. 28, vol. vi. p. 217) utters in French at the very moment of death, and which agrees very closely with similar sayings in Emblem-books by French authors,—Perriere and Corrozet,—and still more in suitableness to the occasion on which it was spoken, the end of life. York and Clifford,—it is the elder of that name,—engage in mortal combat (l. 26),— “_Clif._ My soul and body on the action both! _York._ A dreadful lay! address thee instantly.” [_They fight, and_ CLIFFORD _falls._ At the point of death Clifford uses the words (l. 28), _La fin couronne les œuvres_.[148]—“The end crowns the work.” It was, no doubt, a common proverb; but it is one which would suggest to the Emblem writer his artistic illustration, and, with a little change, from some such illustration it appears to have been borrowed. Whitney (p. 130) records a resemblance to it among the sayings of the Seven Sages, dedicated “_to Sir_ HVGHE CHOLMELEY _Knight_,”— “And SOLON said, _Remember still thy ende_.” [Illustration: _Perriere, 1539._] The two French Emblems alluded to above are illustrative of the proverb, “The end makes us all equal,” and both use a very appropriate and curious device from the game of chess. Take, first, Emb. 27 from Perriere’s _Theatre des Bons Engins_: Paris, 1539,— XXVII.