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for searching only. 722 SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE
these, if indeed they came from books at all. It is possible, therefore, that a complete survey of the available manuals of colloquies before 1575 would yield us Shakspere's "very own."
So far as the list furnished by Baynes is concerned, Pelegromius, a phrase book accessible to Shakspere, furnishes an abundance of Latin phrases as equivalents of "to speak false Latine," many of them rather "smelly." The phrase ad unguem was, of course, so widely used as to make identification of its exact source impossible. Cooper gives the phrase both under unguis and under ad. At the Iatter place, he defines it thus, "4d vnguem, Id est, exquisita diligentia, atq; exactissima cura. Colum. Exactly: absolutely: perfectly," his Englishing reminding one of Erasmus' Costard prefers to make his own translation, "ad dunghill, at the fingers' ends, as they say." Costard has taken a literal translation, and has paralleled it with the corresponding English expression, since the finger nail is at the finger's end. From the literal English translation, the audience should have caught what Costard's Latin was supposed to be. One wonders, incidentally, if this is a kindred joke to that of carrying "real estate" under one's nails.
Dull in this same play knew Cooper's definition of unguis, "A nayle of the fingers or toes in man, birde, or beaste: a claw: a talone: the houfe of an oxe or cow." Dull says, "If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent."' Holofernes has just demonstrated his facility in an alliterative poem, which Sir Nathaniel commends as "A rare talent!", whereupon Dull perpetrates his pun. Dull probably owes his observation itself ultimately to the De Conscribendis Epistolis of Erasmus, a textbook which Shakspere pretty certainly used in grammar school. In a Sylva under the heading Responsio ad Lavdem Mea, Erasmus gives, "Est hoc fere solenne inter eruditos, ut sese mutuis laudibus quasi scabant."5 Cooper defines "Scabo .. . To rubbe, or scratch: to claw." So Dull observes how scholar-like the grave Sir Nathaniel solemnly claws the learned Holofernes.
Armado also exactly reverses the triplicity, "man, birde, or beaste" in Cooper's definition of unguis,, for purposes of climactic propriety, no doubt—"And write God first; for God defend but God should go before such villains!"—but Armado had his fundamental suggestion from the instructions in his rhetoric upon chronography.7 It is clear,
' Erasmus, Copia (1566), p. sit; Cap. CXVI.
' Love's Labor's Lost, IV, 2, 65-66. ' Erasmus, Opera (1703), Vol. I, p. 480.
' Love's Labor's Lost, I,1, 238-240. 7 See Vol. II, pp. 312 if.
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