Note 70 — SCENE II.

Tramontanes,] i. e. strangers, barbarians: so the Italians called, and still call, all who live beyond the Alps, ultra montes. In a subsequent speech, the author does not forget to satirize the acknowledged propensity of his countrymen to drinking: "Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander, are nothing to your Englishman."

If Caponi, as well as Iago, be not, however, too severe upon us, it must be confessed that our ancestors were apt scholars, and soon bettered the instructions which they received. Sir Richard Baker (as Mr. Gilchrist observes), treating of the wars in the Low-Countries about the end of the sixteenth century, says, "Here it must not be omitted, that the English (who, of all the dwellers in the northern parts of the world, were hitherto the least drinkers, and deservedly praised for their sobriety) in these Dutch wars learned to be drunkards, and brought the vice so far to overspread the kingdom, that laws were fain to be enacted for repressing it." Chron. fol. p. 382.—Gifford.