Dear John Yes, both Patrick Powers and Mike Shaw are spot on in identifying your author but, like most renderings, what you wrote is not what Shakespeare would have recognised. The best (pure ASCII) rendering I can do of the key lines as they appear in the First Folio is:
To carue out Dialls queintly, point by point, Thereby to fee the Minutes how they runne: How many makes the Houre full compleate, How many Houres brings about the Day, How many Dayes will finifh vp the Yeare, How many Yeares, a Mortall man may liue. In this, the f of fee and the second f of finifh should not have cross-bars. Each is of course an early 17th century s but they are not like integration signs, they do not have descenders. Readers who know how bawdy Shakespeare can be might note that there is a good deal of double meaning in all this. Indeed the word quaint (with an a) is still in use as a slang word in Scotland. This has nothing to do with sundials! Interested readers can look up quaint in the full OED for more. I am ashamed to say that a particularly bad rendering of this quote appears on a dial I set out in 2002 in Old Palace Yard at the east end of Westminster Abbey. I couldn't persuade my clients (a Joint Committee of the House of Commons and House of Lords) to use proper Shakespeare. Grrrrh! Frank King Cambridge, U.K. -
