In Remembrance OF JOSEPH BROOKS YATES ESQUIRE, OF WEST DINGLE, LIVERPOOL, WHOSE RARE AND EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF BOOKS OF EMBLEMS FIRST ENABLED THE AUTHOR TO STUDY THEIR LITERATURE, THESE _Shakespeare-Illustrations_ ARE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SHAKESPEARE AND THE EMBLEM-WRITERS OF HIS AGE. CHAPTER I. _EMBLEMS, AND THEIR VARIETIES, WITH SOME EARLY EXAMPLES._ WHAT Emblems are, in the general acceptation of the word in modern times, is well set forth in Cotgrave’s _Dictionary_, Art. EMBLEMA, where he defines an emblem to be, “a picture and short posie, expressing some particular conceit;” and very pithily by Francis Quarles, when he says,—“an Emblem is but a silent Parable.” Though less terse and clear than either of these, we may also take Bacon’s description, in his _Advancement of Learning_, bk. v. chap. 5;—“_Embleme_ deduceth conceptions intellectuall to images sensible, and that which is sensible more forcibly strikes the memory, and is more easily imprinted than that which is intellectual.” By many writers of Emblem books, perhaps by the majority in their practice if not in their theories, there is very little difference of meaning observed between Symbols and Emblems. We find, however, in other Authors a more exact usage of the word Symbol. The Greek poet Pindar[1] speaks of “a trustworthy symbol, or sign, concerning a future action,” or from which the future can be conjectured; Iago, recounting the power of Desdemona over Othello, act ii. scene 3, l. 326, declares it were easy “for her To win the Moor, were’t to renounce his baptism, All seals and symbols of redeemed sin;” and Cudworth, in his _True Intellectual System of the Universe_, ed. 1678, p. 388, after giving Aristotle’s assertion “_that Numbers were the Causes of the Essence of other things_,” adds, “though we are not ignorant, how the Pythagoreans made also the Numbers within the Decad, to be Symbols of things.”