A Letter Book

The younger Pliny's full name was C. Plinius Secundus.

66

Among other natives of course.

67

Doubtless the game still played in Italy (pallone) and the South of France, with a wooden hand-guard strapped to the arm.

68

Pyrgus is not exactly backgammon. The Romans had a sort of combined dice-box and board – the latter having a kind of tower fixed on the side with interior steps or stops, among which the dice tumbled and twisted before they fell out.

69

Universitas: but though the context seems tempting, it is too early for "university" as a translation.

70

I.e. in citizenship.

71

I.e. in speech.

72

Why livescentibus I am not sure. "Bruised by the rough mail"? But Lucretius has digiti livescunt: and Sidonius, like other poets of other decadences, is apt to borrow the phrases of his great predecessors.

73

Sidonius has nearly as much more of this curious story: but the picture of the excitable Celts mobbing their heroes is vivid enough to make a good stopping-place. If things really went as described, one must suppose that a sudden panic came on the Goths, and that they took Ecdicius and his handful of troopers as merely éclaireurs of a sally in force, and drew back to the higher ground to resist it.

74

His own experience of marriage cannot have made the subject wholly agreeable to him: for he was, it may not be quite impertinent to remind the reader, the first husband of Eleanor of Guienne.

75

It is to be feared that "My Lord's" action was rather piratical. The "Spanish Fleet" was of merchantmen ("convoyed" perhaps) on their way to the North with iron etc. for fish, silk, etc., and we were not definitely at war with Spain. But Henry the IV. of Castile was an ally of France. Warwick had just been appointed "Captain of Calais," and it was a general English idea that anything not English in the Channel was fair prize. Warwick's conduct was warmly welcomed in London.

76

This use of "abord" and that just before are slightly different derivatives of the French aborder, which means to "approach," "accost," "come together with" as well as to "board" in the naval sense. The first use here is evidently of the more general, the second of the particular kind.

77

This may be a mere mis-spelling of "God," or a sort of euphemism like the modern "thank goodness!" to avoid the more sacred name.

78

"I would" or "take care" or something similar to be supplied to make a somewhat softened imperative.

79

One who prays for you.

80

The allusions to the writer's own Toxophilus at the end require, it is to be hoped, no annotation.

81

Her birth-date does not seem to be known, but she was married in 1551.

82

He had another, of the (for an English girl) very unusual name of "Ambros[z]ia" who died unmarried, at twenty.

83

Most kindly copied for me by the Rev. W. Hunt from Arthur Collins's Sydney Papers.

84

An agreeable phrase, not in the least obsolete, though I have known ignorant persons who thought it so. The "office" was that of Lord Chamberlain; the holder was Lord Howard of Effingham, afterwards famous in the Armada fights.

85

See Kenilworth (chap. xvi.), where Scott brings him in as experiencing Gloriana's extreme uncertainty of temper.

86

I.e. a permanent one such as Hampton Court affords to some.

87

"About"?

88

Either by the Queen herself, whose touchiness is well known, or by jealous and mischief-making fellow courtiers.

89

"Sharing."

90