Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/133

Love's Labour's Lost mountain as suggesting Montaigne, whose essays Florio translated. The date of Florio's Montaigne, 1603, seems sufficient to discredit this theory.

the Nine Worthies. They were variously listed, the most common enumeration being:—Three pagans (Hector, Alexander, and Cæsar); three Jews (Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabæus); and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon). Hercules and Pompey seem to have been first included by Shakespeare.

Hercules in minority. The myth related that the infant Hercules' first exploit was to strangle two serpents which Juno had sent to destroy him. Hart quotes a line from Golding's Ovid (Metamorphoses ix. 79, 80), which may have stuck in the poet's memory: 'It is my Cradle game To vanquish Snakes.'

You'll ne'er be friends with him: a' kill'd your sister. M. Abel Lefranc (Sous le Masque de 'William Shakespeare,' 1919, ii. p. 73–80) identifies this sister of Katharine with Hélène de Tournon, an attendant of Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, who actually died of love in 1577. But the incident is so similar to Viola's famous story of her sister in Twelfth Night that it seems more likely to have come from something in the personal experience of the poet than from anything in the source material of Love's Labour's Lost.

I weigh not you. A pun, as the next line shows, on two idioms: (1) 'I do not equal you in weight,' and (2) 'I don’t care about you.'

Much in the letters, nothing in the praise. Furness explains 'The resemblance was great in the dark colour of the letters, but not at all in the substance of the praise.'

Fair as a text B in a copy-book. A large ornamental capital in the old 'Gothic' hand: a 'black-letter,'