able and discomfortable—are uniformly applied to a person, or to a thing personified, the idea of will and purpose being always implied in them. Timon, iv. 3 (so I would arrange the lines),—

"Had I a steward so true, so just, and now
So comfortable ? "

Romeo and Juliet, v. 3,

"O comfortable friar! where is my lord ? "

All's Well, &c.,-" Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress, and make much of her." King Lear, i. 4,—

yet have I left a daughter,

Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable."

(In As You Like It, ii. 6,

"For my sake be comfortable," the word seems to be used in a passive sense, nearly as Knight explains it, susceptible of comfort. See above, "comfort a little.") King Richard II. iii. 2,—

"Discomfortable cousin!"

See context.

Ford, Lover's Melancholy, v. 1; see context,―

Been always comfortable to me, certainly
Things had gone worse."

Middleton, &c., Old Law, ii. 2, Moxon's Massinger, p. 423, col. 2,

"In troth, Eugenia, I have cause to weep too;

But, when I visit, I come comfortably,

And look to be so quited."

Ford, Lady's Trial, iii. 3, near the beginning,

"How surely dost thou malice these extremes,
Uncomfortable man!"

And so, perhaps, in Milton, P. L. 1077,-
And sends a comfortable heat from far,
Which might supply the sun."

And Bunyan, P. P. Part ii.,- "So I saw in my

dream that

they went on their way, and the weather was comfortable unto them."

(Fol. ingenuous.) Dyce's note on Webster's Dutchess of Malfi, iii. 2, Dyce's Webster, vol. i. p. 238,

our weak safety

Rests upon enginous wheels: short syllables
Must stand for periods."

"The quarto of 1640 substitutes 'ingenious.' So Dekker,—
"For that one Acte gives like an enginous wheele
Action to all.'

The Whore of Babylon, Sig. C 2."

Add Middleton, Triumphs of Integrity, description of one of the pageants, Dyce, vol. v. p. 316,-" those beams, by enginous art, made often to mount and spread like a golden and glorious canopy over the deified persons that are placed

under it." Marlowe and Chapman, Hero and Leander, iii. Dyce, vol. iii. p. 51, ed. 1850,—

"All tools that enginous despair could frame.”

Chapman, Odyss. i. fol. p. 11,—

te

consider how thou mayst deprive

Of worthless life these wooers in thy house
By open force or projects enginous.

In these two last examples it means ingenious; in Shakespeare, as in the examples quoted from Webster, Dekker, and Middleton, the meaning is, ingenio factum, artificial, constructed by art; write therefore—postulante etiam metro (for the elision of y in my is not in Shakespeare's way)enginous or inginous. Moreover I would write ingen❜ous in another passage of the Dutchess of Malfi, i. 1, Dyce, p. 193,

So ingenious and hearty; I believe it ; "

for, although the meaning here is ingenuous (" ingenious and ingenuous were often used for each other;" Whalley ap. Gifford's Jonson, vol. ii. p. 126), yet the pronunciation is evidently the same. On the other hand, in the prologue to Fletcher's Chances, we have ingenuous for ingenious,— "My promise will find credit with the most,

When they know ingenuous Fletcher made it, he
Being in himself a perfect comedy."

Pronounce inginous; and so in Lord Brooke, Treatie of Humane Learning, St. xliii. (in the same sense Inquisition upon Fame, &c. St. vi.),

"Yea, Rome itself, while there in her remain'd

That ancient, ingenious austerity,

The Greeks' professors from her walls restrain'd."

So pronounce also, Jonson, Fox, v. 1, near the beginning,—

'

Any device, now, of rare ingenious knavery,

That would possess me with a violent laughter," &c.

Or rather write rare-inginous.

Ingine or engine, as is well known to those conversant in our old writers, was used by them to designate a contrivance, whether in the form of an artifice or stratagem, or of a weapon, instrument, or piece of machinery. From the former sense we have the name Malengin in Spenser, F. Q. B. v. C. ix. St. v. ubi vide; and so understand Bacon, Essay of Superstition, "the schoolmen were like astronomers, which did feign eccentrics and epicycles, and such engines of orbs, to save the phænomena, though they knew there were no such things; "-devices. I find it used in the latter sense as late as the Pilgrim's Progress; P. i. Christian's visit to the House Beautifull,-"They also showed him some of the engines with which some of his (their Lord's) servants had done wonderful things. They showed him Moses's rod; the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera; the pitchers, trumpets, and lamps, too, with which Gideon put to flight the armies of Midian." And he goes on to specify Shamgar's ox-goad, Samson's jaw-bone, David's sling and stone, &c. For engine, as is well known, they sometimes used gin; e.g., Beaumont and Fletcher, Queen of Corinth, iii. 1,—

I should curse my fortune,

Even at the highest, to be made a gin
T'unscrew a mother's love unto her son."

Maid in the Mill, i. 1,—

"Prithee forbear: the gentlewomen-

Mart.

That moves me like a gin."

That's it, man,

So read in Rowley, Noble Soldier, i. 1. 1634, 2nd page,"I would not, for what lyes beneath the Moone,

Be made a wicked Engine to break in pieces

That holy Contract."

And, I think, in Webster, Vittoria Corombona, Retrosp. vol. vii. p. 95 (Dyce, vol. i. p. 64),—

"And by a vaulting engine.

Mon.

He jumpt into his grave."

An active plot;

(Gin occurs in this sense in Surrey; Version of Æn. ii. ed. 1631, p. 125,

"This fatal gin thus overclamb our walls,

Stuft with arm'd men.'

"Scandit fatalis machina muros, Foeta armis."

Engine is also used in the strict sense of ingenium. Jonson, on Sir John Beaumont's Poems, Gifford, vol. viii. p. 335,"And doth deserve all muniments of praise

That art, or ingine, on the strength can raise."

Masque of the Fortunate Isles, p. 73-4,

As Christmas, when disguising is afoot,

To ask of the inventions, and the men,

The wits, and the ingines that move those orbs!"

Where is an instance of ingínes to be found? I imagine that Jonson wrote

"The wits and th' inginers that," &c. ;

wits (ingenia) being associated with inginers, as inventions with men.