Note 145 — SCENE II.
Reading edition
We are not parallels; but, like lines divided, Can ne'er meet in one centre.] Not only Massinger, but many of our old writers, use parallels for radii.
In the Proëme to Herbert's Travels, which were printed not long after The Maid of Honour, a similar expression is found: "Great Britaine—containes the summe and abridge of all sorts of excellencies, met here like parallels in their proper centre."
In the life of Dr. H. More (1710) there is a letter to a correspondent who had sent him a pious treatise, in which the same expression occurs, and is thus noticed by the doctor: "There is but one passage that I remember, which will afford them (the profane and atheistical rout of the age) a disingenuous satisfaction; which is in p. 489, where you say that straight lines drawn from the centre run parallel together. To a candid reader your intended sense can be no other than that they run παῥ αλλἡλας, that is, by one another; which they may do, though they do not run all along equidistantly one by another, which is the mathematical sense of the word parallel."—Gent. Mag. May, 1782. The good doctor is, I think, the best critic on the subject that has yet appeared, and sufficiently explains Massinger.—Gifford.