Note 24 — CHARACTERS OF PASSION AND IMAGINATION.
Reading edition
There is an allusion to this court language of love in "All Well that Ends Well," where Helena says,—
There shall your master have a thousand loves— A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign; A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear, His humble ambition, proud humility, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcut, His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips.—Act i Scene 1
The courtly poets of Elizabeth's time, who copied the Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits.