a Enter Sir Hugh Evans, &c.] This stage-direction is chiefly made up from that in the early quarto. The folio has only, "Enter fairies." The introduction of Pistol and Mistress Quickly in this scene, is to be accounted for on the supposition that the necessity of the theatre compelled the performers of these characters to take part among the fairies, and that the names thus got inserted in the print d copies.

b QUEEN.] There is nothing inconsistent in the prefix Quic. to these speeches in the quarto, because Mistress Quickly, or rather the actor who personated that character, was intended to "double" with it the Fairy Queen; but in the enlarged play, as Anne Page enacts the latter part, the prefix should certainly be "Queen.'

You orphan-heirs of fixed destiny,-] Warburton proposed,

Our radiant queen hates sluts, and sluttery. FAL. They are fairies; he that speaks to them, shall die:

I'll wink and couch: no man their works must [Lies down upon his face. EVA. Where's Pede?*-Go you, and where

eye.

you find a maid,

That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy,

Sleep she as sound as careless infancy;

Put those as sleep, and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, packs, shoulders, sides,

and shins.

QUEEN. About, about;

Search Windsor castle, elves, within and out; Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room;

630.

(*) First folio, Bede.

with plausibility, to read, "Ouphen heirs," but see note (3), page d QUEEN. Crier Hobgoblin, make the fairy o-yes. PIST Elves, list your names; silence, you airy toys.] "These two lines were certainly intended to rhyme together, as the preceding and subsequent couplets do; and accordingly, in the old editions, the final words of each line are printed oges and toyes. This therefore is a striking instance of the inconvenience which has arisen from modernizing the orthography of Shakespeare."-TYRWHITT.

EVA. Sir John Falstaff, serve Got, and leave your desires, and fairies will not pinse you.

FORD. Well said, fairy Hugh.

EVA. And leave you your jealousies too, I pray

you.

FORD. I will never mistrust my wife again, till thou art able to woo her in good English.

FAL. Have I laid my brain in the sun, and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o'er-reaching as this? Am I ridden with a Welsh goat too? Shall I have a coxcomb of frieze?a 'tis time I were choked with a piece of toasted cheese. EVA. Seese is not good to give putter; your pelly is all putter.

FAL. Seese and putter! have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?

a A coxcomb of frieze?] A fool's cap made of frieze. Wales was celebrated for this description of cloth.

This is enough to be the decay of lust and latewalking, through the realm.

MRS. PAGE. Why, sir John, do you think, though we would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and have given ourselves without scruple to hell, that ever the devil could have made you our delight?

FORD. What, a hodge-pudding? a bag of flax? MRS. PAGE. A puffed man?

PAGE. Old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails?

FORD. And one that is as slanderous as Satan? PAGE. And as poor as Job?

FORD. And as wicked as his wife?

EVA. And given to fornications, and to taverns, and sack, and wine, and metheglins, and to drinkings, and swearings, and starings, pribbles and prabbles?

FAL. Well, I am your theme: you have the start of me; I am dejected; I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel: ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me: use me as you will.

FORD. Marry, sir, we'll bring you to Windsor, to one master Brook, that you have cozened of money, to whom you should have been a pander: over and above that you have suffered, I think, to repay that money will be a biting affliction. PAGE. Yet be cheerful, knight: thou shalt eat a posset(2) to-night at my house; where I will desire thee to laugh at my wife, that now laughs at thee: tell her, master Slender hath married her daughter.

MRS. PAGE. Doctors doubt that if Anne Page be my daughter, she is, by this, doctor Caius' wife. [Aside.

Enter SLENDER.

SLEN. Whoo, ho! ho! father Page! PAGE. Son! how now? how now, son? have you despatched?

SLEN. Despatched!-I'll make the best in Gloucestershire know on't; would I were banged, la, else.

PAGE. Of what, son?

SLEN. I came yonder at Eton to marry mistress Anne Page, and she's a great lubberly boy if it had not been i' th' church, I would have swinged him, or he should have swinged me. If I did not think it had been Anne Page, would I might never stir, and 'tis a post-master's boy.

PAGE. Upon my life then you took the wrong. SLEN. What need you tell me that? I think so, when I took a boy for a girl: if I had been married to him, for all he was in woman's apparel, I would not have had him.

PAGE. Why, this is your own folly. Did not I tell you, how you should know my daughter by her garments?

SLEN. I went to her in white,* and cried, mum, and she cried budget, as Anne and I had appointed; and yet it was not Anne, but a post-master's boy.

MRS. PAGE. Good George, be not angry: I knew of your purpose; turned my daughter into green; and, indeed, she is now with the doctor at the deanery, and there married.

:

FORD. Stand not amaz'd: here is no remedy :In love, the heavens themselves do guide the state; Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.

FAL. I am glad, though you have ta'en a special stand (3) to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced.

PAGE. Well, what remedy ?(4) Fenton, heaven give thee joy!

What cannot be eschew'd, must be embrac❜d. FAL. When night-dogs run, all sorts of deer are chas'd.

MRS. PAGE. Well, I will muse no further:master Fenton,

Heaven give you many, many merry days!—
Good husband, let us every one go home,
And laugh this sport o'er by a country fire;
Sir John and all.

FORD.
Let it be so.- -Sir John,
To master Brook you yet shall hold your word;
For he, to-night, shall lie with mistress Ford.

(*) Old text, while.

[Exeunt.

What hath hung plummets on thy nimble soul,
What sleepy rod hath charm'd thy mounting spirit?"

b Amaze her:] Confound her by these questions.

e Unduteous title;] Mr. Collier's annotator reads, very speciously, "unduteous guile."

(1) SCENE I.-Sir Hugh.] The title of Sir was probably at one time applied to priests and curates without distinction, but subsequently became appropriated only to the inferior clergy, such as are called Readers. It was no more than the translation of Dominus, the academical distinction of a Bachelor of Arts. Fuller, in his Church History, says, there were formerly more Sirs than Knights in England, and adds, "Such priests as have the addition of Sir before their Christian naine, were men not graduated in the university, being in orders, but not in degrees, whilst others entituled Masters had commenced in the arts."

(2) SCENE I.—I will make a Star-chamber matter of it.] The Court of Star Chamber, as it was familiarly called from the sitting being held en la chambre des estoyers, was the King's Council, the nature and extent of whose jurisdiction, even so early as the reign of Henry VII. when it was remodelled, were sufficiently extraordinary. The preamble of the Act relating to this Court, which was passed in the third of his reign, sets forth, that "the King, remembering how by unlawful maintenances, giving of liveries, signs and tokens, and retaining by indentures, promises, oaths, writings or otherwise, embraceries of his subjects, untrue demeanings of Sheriffs, in making of pannels and other untrue returns, by taking of money by juries, by great riots and unlawful assemblies, the policy and good rule of this realm is almost subdued:" &c. &c. "whereby the laws of the land in execution may take little effect, to the increase of murders, robberies, perjuries and unsureties of all men living," &c. For the reformation of which, it was now ordained that the chancellor, treasurer, and privy seal, or two of them, calling to them a bishop and a temporal lord, being of the Council, and the two Chief Justices, or in their absence, two other justices upon bill of information put to the Chancellor for the King, or any other, against any person for any misbehaviour above mentioned, have authority to call before them by writ or privy-seal, the offenders and others as it shall seem fit, by whom the truth may be known, and to examine and punish, after the form and effect of statutes thereof made, in like manner, aey ought to be punished, if they were convict after the due order of the law.

A tribunal, paramount as this, whose proceedings were summary, and whose punishments, though professedly in accordance with the laws, were administered with much more promptitude than those of the ordinary courts, soon acquired under the Tudors a formidable and dangerous authority,-an authority, as we know from history, which at length became tremendous, and ultimately led to its final abolition in the reign of Charles I.

The ridicule in the play is the making the vain and imbecile old Justice suppose his petty squabble with Falstaff of sufficient importance to be adjudicated by such a Court.

(3) SCENE I.-The luce is the fresh fish; the salt fish is an old coat.] Much has been written upon this perplexing passage to little purpose. It still remains, as Mr. Knight terms it, an heraldic puzzle." There is, unquestionably, an allusion to the arms of Shakespeare's

old foe, Sir Thomas Lucy, and it is conjecturable that the "dozen white luces," which were borne by one branch of the Lucy family, may have implied the salt-water pike, and have been an older scutcheon than the "three lucies hauriant" of the Warwickshire branch.

(4) SCENE I-I heard say, he was out-run on Cotsale.] The Cotswold hills in Gloucestershire, a large tract of fine turfed downs, were among the places famous in times of yore for rural games; but the sports here and elsewhere appear to have declined during the latter part of the sixteenth century, owing perhaps, to the rigorous puritanical crusade carried on against all popular diversions. About the end of Elizabeth's reign, or, as some say, at the beginning of her successor's, they were revived, however, with increased spirit, through the exertions of Mr. Robert Dover, an attorney of Barton-on-the-Heath in Warwickshire, who instituted an annual celebration of rustic amusements, which he conducted in person; consisting of wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar, managing the pike, dancing and coursing the hare with greyhounds.

(5) SCENE I.--I have seen Sackerson loose, terenty times.] Sackerson, so named in all likelihood after his keeper, was a famous bear belonging to the Paris bear-baiting Garden on the Bankside; and the allusions to him and Harry Hunks and George Stone, two contemporary beasts of prowess, by the old writers, sufficiently attest the popularity of this savage sport in former time :

"Publius, a student of the common law,
To Paris-garden doth himself withdraw ;-
Leaving old Ployden, Dyer and Broke alone,
To see old Harry Hunkes and Sacarson."

Epigrams by SIR JOHN DAVIES.

"Ile be sworne they tooke away a mastie dogge of mine by commission. Now I thinke on't, makes my teares stand in my eyes with grief. I had rather lost the dearest friend that ever I lay withal in my life. Be this light, never stir if hee fought not with great Sekerson foure hours to one, foremoste take up hindmoste, and tooke so many loaves from him, that hee sterv'd him presently. So, at last, the dogg cood doe no more then a beare cood, and the beare being heavie with hunger you know, fell uppon the dogge, broke his backe, and the dogge never stird more."-r Gyles Goosecappe Knight, a Comedie presented by the Chil. of the Chappell, 1606.