l86 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES (not Hippocrene ; and so elsewhere in Jonson, though my Lord Winchelsea, with immense self- sufficiency, denounced a certain Miltonic poem as spurious because it thus made the mount a spring), and leave the stage in pairs singing a palinode, in the form of a litany, whereof one verse is — " From stabbing of arms, flap-dragons, healths, whiffs, and all such swaggering humours, Chorus. Good Mercury defend us." Of whiffs we have had enough in "Every Man out of his Humour"; for the stabbing of arms Gifford brings two apposite quotations : — " How many gallants have drank healths to me Out of their daggered arms ! " — Decker's ^^ Honest Whore." "By the faith of a soldier, lady, I do reverence the ground that you walk upon. I will fight with him that dares say you are not fair, stab him that will not pledge your health, and with a dagger open a vein to drink a full health to you." — Green's " Tu Quoque." In the Apologetical Dialogue added to the " Poet- aster" (1601) — see Section 2 — the author, referring to his assailants, Decker, Marston, and the rest, says : — " or I could do worse, Armed with Archilochus' fury, write Iambics. Should make the desperate lashers hang themselves, Rhime them to death, as they do Irish rats*
- " I was never so be-rhimed since Pythagoras' time, that I was
an Irish rat." — As You Like It, Act ill., Sc. 2.
