370 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



"You draw me, you hard hearted adamant, 

 But yet you draw not iron, for my heart 

 Is true as steel: Leave you your power to draw, 

 And I shall have no power to follow you." l 



Perhaps he thought that his rival, Greene, had already 

 made the metaphor too common. Perhaps by putting the 

 figure in its single use in the mouth of the love-sick girl 

 he meant to satirize Greene's overworking of it. 2 Perhaps 

 he was no believer in the "miracles of science," now so 

 called. u They say miracles are past," he remarks, with 

 something of the non-inquisitive superciliousness with 

 which a peripatetic might stop in his lazy promenade be- 

 side the Lykeum to gaze on a gardener grafting a tree. 



1 Midsummer Night's Dream. Act L, Sc. i. 



2 1 append the following : 



" Beautie is the Syren which will drawe the most adamant by force." 

 Mammilia. 



" For the Adamant drawes by vertue though Iron strive by nature." 

 Ibid. 



" Yet they have in their eyes adamants that will draw youth as the let 

 the straw." Never too Late. 1590. 



" A woman's teares are Adamant, and men are no harder than Iron, 

 and therefore may be drawn to pitie." Ibid. 



Here are two quotations in which the figure changes: 



" Their hearts like Adamants that will turn no way but to one poynt 

 of heaven." Never too Late. 



" For the fingers of Lifts (shoplifters) are fourmed of Adamant; though 

 they touch not, yet they have vertue attractive to drawe any pelfe to 

 them as the Adamant dooth the Iron." Notable Discy. of Coosnage. 



See Greene: Life and Works. Huth Library. 1881-83. 



Jonson (Every Man out of his Humour. Act III., Sc. 2,) probably car- 

 ries the attractive figure to the limits of hyperbole 



Would to heaven 



In wreak of my misfortune I were turn'd 

 To some fair nymph, that set upon 

 The deepest whirlpit of the rav'nous seas, 

 My adamantine eyes might headlong hale 

 This iron world to me and drown it all. 



Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida. Act III., Sc. 2,) uses the similt 

 "as true as iron to adamant," which may refer either to attraction 

 directive tendency. 



