As doth the Danaw, which begins to flow

By Raurak fields with snaking crangling slow ;
Then swells his floods with sixty rivers large,

That in the soft Euxinus doth discharge.

We are, perhaps, not to scan such a passage too closely, but it would seem as if the bend in the Trent was rather favourable to Hotspur than the contrary.

III. 3. FALSTAFF.

Rob me the Exchequer the first thing thou doest.

Such a proposal was not without warrant from such an attempt having actually been made. Thus Lanquet, in his Chronicle, A. D. 1557-"A conspiracy was made by certain mean persons in England, whose purpose was to have robbed the Queen's Exchequer: to this intent, as the talk was, that they might be able to maintain war against the Queen." There was also a rumour of an attempt to rob the Exchequer in 1573.

IV. 2. PR. HENRY.

How now, blown JACK? how now, QUILT?

Compare with this, Spenser, in his View of the State of Ireland, as quoted in Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen, vol. i. p. 266. "The quilted leather jack is old English; for it was the proper weed of the horseman, as you may read in Chaucer, where he describeth Sir Thopas' apparel, &c." Quilt was an extraordinary word to be used here, and it seems that it was suggested to the Poet's mind by the word jack, with which, in another sense of it, it was as we see connected.

V. 2. HOтspur.

The time of life is short:

To spend that shortness basely 'TWERE too long,

If life did ride upon the dial's point,

Still ending with the arrival of an hour.

I have ventured on the substitution of 'twere for were, the

reading of all the editions, I believe, ancient and modern. These kind of elisions are very common in the old text, and have not been sufficiently attended to by the modern editors.

V. 3. FALSTAff.

If Percy be alive I'll pierce him.

Percy seems to have been pronounced as if written Piercy. John Davies (commonly called of Hereford) in 1605 dedicated his Humours Heaven on Earth to Algernon Lord Percy, son to the Earl and Countess of Northumberland above mentioned; and in the dedication he thus puns on the

name:

Read, little lord, this riddle learn to read;
So, first appose; then tell it to thy peers :
So shall they hold thee both in name and deed,
A perfect Pierc-ey that in darkness cheers.
A Pierc-ey, or a piercing eye doth shew
Both wit and courage; and if thou wilt learn
By moral tales sins mortal to eschew,
Thou shalt be wise and endless glory earn:
That so thou maiest thy meanest tutor prays;
So Percie's fame shall pierce the eye of days.

There are few persons who have written and printed so much verse, and with so little success, as Davies of Hereford. The chief value of his writings has arisen from his having given so many notices of persons who were connected with literature and the arts in his time.

KING HENRY THE FOURTH.

PART THE SECOND.

THE Second Part of King Henry the Fourth soon followed on the First. It was entered for publication on August 23, 1600. There is a quarto of that year.

The characters of the Gloucestershire justice, and his relation Slender, first appear in this play. I have made some remarks upon them in the Illustration of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Pistol makes here his first appearance. The character is an extravaganza; but there was an inflated mode of speaking in use among soldiers at that time. Thus Melton, when ridiculing the absurd phrases of the Astrologer, says :"The Mountebank's drug tongue, the Soldier's bumbasted tongue, the Gipsies' canting tongue, the Lawyer's French tongue, the Welch tongue; nay, all the tongues that were at the fall of Babylon (when they were all confusedly mingled together) could as well be understood as his strange tongue." -The Astrologaster, 4to. 1620, p. 15.

II. 3. LADY PERCY.

When your own Percy, when my heart's dear Harry,
Threw many a northward look, to see his father

Bring up his powers; but he did long in vain.

و"

Shakespeare was pleased with his conception of feminine tenderness in the character of the wife of Hotspur, and, therefore, though Hotspur was dead, and the circumstances

of the history little called for it, he introduces the lady again, manifesting her strong affection, and engaging the sympathy and best feelings of the audience; or he might wish thus a second time to turn the public sympathy towards the sister of Essex, and wife of the morose Earl of Northumberland. The whole of this speech is singularly beautiful, and the few lines quoted above present us a natural image sharply cut, and most picturesquely placed.

II. 4. HoSTESS.

TILLY-FALLY, Sir John, never tell me.

"Tilly-fally" occurs again in Twelfth Night, written about the same time with this play. This foolish interjection appears to be of Cornish extraction. In The Creation of the World, a dramatic poem, written in the Cornish language, 1681, published by Mr. Davies Gilbert, when the wife of Cain remonstrates with him on the murder of his brother, he replies,

Tety valy, bram en gath, &c.

which is thus translated,

Tittle-tattle, the wind of a cat, &c.

It was a favourite phrase of the wife of Sir Thomas More; and it is remarkable that the Hostess just before is made to use another of the phrases which were favourites of the same lady, "What the good-year, one must bear," which looks as if Shakespeare might lately have been reading one of the Lives of Sir Thomas, in which there are amusing specimens at once of the philosophy and eloquence of the lady whom he married, when he had lost his first wife, the mother of his accomplished daughters.

II. 4. DOLL.

What with two points on your shoulder? MUCH!

The commentators seem to have failed in their attempts at explaining this word. It was used as a substantive, and is probably allied to mich, a filcher, rather than to the particle much. I quote the following authority from An Essay of the means how to make our travels into foreign countries the more profitable and honourable, 4to. 1606, the author of which was Sir Thomas Palmer, of Wingham, in Kent.

There is another kind of intelligencers, (but base in respect of the former, by reason they assume a liberty to say what they list,) who are inquisiters or divers into the behaviours or affections of men belonging to a state, the carriages of whom are very insupportable; oftentimes exercising any liberty or licentiousness to pry into the hearts of men, to know how such stand affected. But being also necessary evils in a state, I would counsaile such as unhappily shall have to deal with this pack of muches not so favourably to suffer them to rail upon the nobility of the land and discover faults in the state, to blaspheme and dishonour the Majesty of God and of their prince, but rather to conjure such so as never afterwards they shall delight in that humorous-carnal-tempting, and divellish profession.-p. 5.

III. 1. K. HENRY.

And leav'st the kingly couch

A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell.

The Poet seems to have had in his mind Spenser's beautiful allegory of the Cottage of Care, with its

Thousand iron hammers beating rank.

He has the same idea of incessant iteration, represented by the ceaseless ticking of a clock.

V. 3. PISTOL.

Under which king, BEZONIAN? speak, or die.

The commentators have not given a correct idea of the meaning of this word, which occurs again in 2 Henry VI. iv. 1. "Great men oft die by vile Bezonians," It was a word used in the army for "a raw soldier, unexpert in his weapon and other military points." Thus it is explained by Barret in his Explanation of Terms added to his Theorike and Prac