Note 38 — I.

(return) See a curious letter of Pirkheimer on the death of Albert Durer, quoted in the Foreign Quarterly Review, No. 21. "In Albert I have truly lost one of the best friends I had in the whole world, and nothing grieves me deeper than that he should have died so painful a death, which, under God's providence, I can ascribe to nobody but his huswife, who gnawed into his very heart, and so tormented him that he departed hence the sooner; for he was dried up to a faggot, and might nowhere seek him a jovial humour or go to his friends." (After much more, reflecting on this intolerable woman, he concludes with edifying naïveté;) "She and her sister are not queans; they are, I doubt not, in the number of honest, devout, and altogether God-fearing women, but a man might better have a quean who was otherwise kindly, than such a gnawing, suspicious, quarrelsome, good woman, with whom he can have no peace or quiet neither by day nor by night."