The Dutch think no People are so much troubled with the Scurvy as they: But they mistake. There are more blotched Faces in one Town in England, than in the whole Dutch Province …

These Sot-weed Planters Crowd the Shoar [more recent explanatory foot-note] Sot-Weed, i. e. the sot making or inebriating weed; a name for tobacco, used at that time. A Sot-weed Factor, was a tobacco agent or supercargo.

These superstitions and traditions were all odd and strange beliefs, which mingled the materialistic and the spiritual most incongruously; but they were not so degrading, and they were not so far from truth as the “enlightened” ideas respecting our origin, circulated in costly volumes during recent years, by authors whose Adam and Eve were frogs, formed from slime by the action of the sun, with a dash of electricity, and in which, from gratitude for their descent, their progeny for centuries, millenniums, or millionenniums wallowed.

A man & a younge maid that loued a long time / were tane in a frenzye ithe Midsommer prime; / the maid shee lay drooping, hye; / the man he lay whopping, hey, the man he lay whopping hoe.