The _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ (act i. sc. I, l. 180, vol. ii. p. 205), introduces Hermia greeting her rival Helena,— “_Her._ God speed fair Helena! whither away? _Hel._ Call you me fair? that fair again unsay. Demetrius loves you fair: O happy fair! Your eyes are lode-stars.” The scene changes, Helena is following Demetrius, but he turns to her and says (act ii. sc. 1, l. 194, vol. ii. p. 217),— “Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more. _Hel._ You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant; But yet you draw not iron, for my heart Is true as steel: leave but your power to draw, And I shall have no power to follow you.” The averment of his fidelity is thus made by Troilus to Cressida (act iii. sc. 2, l. 169. vol. vi. p. 191),— “As true as steel, as plantage to the moon, As sun to day, as turtle to her mate, As iron to adamant, as earth to the centre. Yet after all comparisons of truth, As truth’s authentic author to be cited, ‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse And sanctify the numbers.” So Romeo avers of one of his followers (act ii. sc. 4, l. 187, vol. vii. p. 58),— “I warrant thee, my man’s as true as steel.” “EX MAXIMO MINIMVM,”—_Out of the greatest the least_,—is a saying adopted by Whitney (p. 229), from the “PICTA POESIS” (p. 55) of Anulus,— EX MAXIMO MINIMVM. [Illustration: _Aneau, 1555._] HAE _Sunt Relliquiæ Sacrarij, in quo Fertur viua Dei fuiſse imago. Hæc eſt illius, & domus ruina, In qua olim Ratio tenebat arcem. At nunc horribilis figura Mortis. Ventoſum caput, haud habens cerebrum_. Both writers make the proverb the groundwork of reflexions on a human skull. According to Anulus, “the relics of the charnel house were once the living images of God,”—“that ruin of a dome was formerly the citadel of reason.” Whitney thus moralizes,— “WHERE liuely once, GODS image was expreste, Wherin, sometime was sacred reason plac’de, The head, I meane, that is so ritchly bleste, With sighte, with smell, with hearinge, and with taste. Lo, nowe a skull, both rotten, bare, and drye, A relike meete in charnell house to lye.” The device and explanatory lines may well have given suggestion to the half-serious, half-cynical remarks by Hamlet in the celebrated grave-yard scene (_Hamlet_, act v. sc. 1, l. 73, vol. viii. p. 153). A skull is noticed which one of the callous grave-diggers had just thrown up upon the sod, and Hamlet says (l. 86),— “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder!” And a little further on,—