To do brave acts; he was, indeed, the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
He had no legs, that practis'd not his gait1:
And speaking thick2, which nature made his blemish,
Became the accents of the valiant ;

For those that could speak low, and tardily,
Would turn their own perfection to abuse,
To seem like him: So that, in speech, in gait,
In diet, in affections of delight,

In military rules, humours of blood,

He was the mark and glass, copy and book 3,
That fashion❜d others. And him,-O wondrous him!
O miracle of men!-him did you leave
(Second to none, unseconded by you),
To look upon the hideous god of war
In disadvantage; to abide a field,

Where nothing but the sound of Hotspur's name
Did seem defensible *:-so you left him :
Never, O never, do his ghost the wrong,
To hold your honour more precise and nice
With others, than with him; let them alone;
The marshal, and the archbishop, are strong:
Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers,

The twenty-two following lines were first given in the folio. 2 Speaking thick is speaking quick, rapidity of utterance. Baret translates the anhilitus creber of Virgil thicke-breathing. So in Cymbeline :

say and speak thick,

Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing.' See note on Macbeth, Act i. Sc. 3, p. 221. Became the accents of the valiant, that is, came to be affected by them.

3 Thus in the Rape of Lucrece :

For princes are the glass, the school, the book

Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look.'

4 Defensible does not in this place mean capable of defence, but bearing strength, furnishing the means of defence; the passive for the active participle.

To-day might-I, hanging on Hotspur's neck,
Have talk'd of Monmouth's grave.

North.

Beshrew 5 your heart, Fair daughter! you do draw my spirits from me, With new lamenting ancient oversights.

But I must go, and meet with danger there;
Or it will seek me in another place,

And find me worse provided.

Lady N. O, fly to Scotland, Till that the nobles, and the armed commons, Have of their puissance made a little taste.

Lady P. If they get ground and vantage of the king,

Then join you with them, like a rib of steel,
To make strength stronger; but, for all our loves,
First let them try themselves: So did your son;
He was so suffer'd; so came I a widow;
And never shall have length of life enough,
To rain upon remembrance 6 with mine eyes,
That it may grow and sprout as high as heaven,
For recordation to my noble husband.

North. Come, come, go in with me: 'tis with
mind,

my

As with the tide swell'd up unto its height,
That makes a still-stand, running neither way.
Fain would I go to meet the archbishop,
But many thousand reasons hold me back:-
I will resolve for Scotland; there am I,
Till time and vantage crave my company. [Exeunt.

5 Ill-betide.

6 Alluding to the plant rosemary, so called because it was the symbol of remembrance, and therefore used at weddings and funerals. Thus Ophelia says:—

'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.'

And Perdita gives it the same attribute.

SCENE IV. London.

A Room in the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap.

Enter Two Drawers.

1 Draw. What the devil hast thou brought there? apple-Johns? thou know'st, Sir John cannot endure an apple-John 1.

2 Draw. Mass, thou sayest true: The prince once set a dish of apple-Johns before him, and told him, there were five more Sir Johns: and, putting off his hat, said, I will now take my leave of these six dry, round, old, withered knights. It angered him to the heart; but he hath forgot that.

1 Draw. Why then, cover, and set them down: And see if thou canst find out Sneak's noise2; mistress Tear-sheet would fain hear some musick. Despatch:-The room where they supped is too hot; they'll come in straight.

2 Draw. Sirrah, here will be the prince, and master Poins anon: and they will put on two of our jerkins,

1 This apple, which was said to keep two years, is well described by Philips: :

'Nor John-apple, whose wither'd rind entrench'd

By many a furrow, aptly represents

Decrepid age.'

Falstaff has already said of himself, I am withered like an old apple-John.' In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, where Littlewit encourages Quarlous to kiss his wife, he says, ' She may call you an apple-John if you use this.' Act i. Sc. 3. Here apple-John evidently means a pimp, or pander, then called an apple-squire.

2 A noise, or a consort, was used for a set or company of musicians. Sneak was a street minstrel, and therefore the drawer goes out to listen for his band. Falstaff addresses them as a company in another scene. In the old play of King Henry IV. 'There came the young prince, and two or three more of his companions, and called for wine good store, and then sent for a noyse of musitians,' &c. Vide Macbeth, Act iv. Sc. i.

and aprons; and Sir John must not know of it: Bardolph hath brought word.

1 Draw. By the mass, here will be old utis3: It will be an excellent stratagem.

2 Draw. I'll see if I can find out Sneak. [Exit.

Enter Hostess and DOLL TEAR-SHEET.

Host. I'faith, sweet heart, methinks now you are in an excellent good temperality: your pulsidge beats as extraordinarily as heart would desire; and your colour, I warrant you, is as red as any rose; But, i'faith, you have drunk too much canaries; and that's a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the blood ere one can say,-What's this? How do you now?

Dol. Better than I was. Hem.

Host. Why, that's well said; a good heart's worth gold. Look, here comes Sir John.

Enter FALSTAFF, singing.

Fal. When Arthur first in court.-Empty the jordan. And was a worthy king: [Exit Drawer.] How now, mistress Doll?

3 Old utis is old festivity, or merry doings. Utis, or utas, being the eighth day after any festival; any day between the feast and the eighth day was said to be within the utas. So Sir Thomas More, in the last letter he wrote to his daughter the day before his execution, desires to die on the morrow, For it is Saint Thomas' even, and the utas of Saint Peter.' In A Contention between Liberality and Prodigality, 1602:

'Then, if you please, with some roysting harmony
Let us begin the utas of our jollity.'

Utis is said to be still used for what is called a row, a scene of
noisy turbulence, in Warwickshire. Old was a common augmen-
tative for abundant, or as of old time; it can hardly yet be con-
sidered as obsolete. So in The Merry Wives of Windsor :-
'Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's
English.' See Macbeth, Act ii. Sc. 3; and Taming of the Shrew,
Act iii. Sc. 2, p. 348.

4 The entire ballad is in the first volume of Dr. Percy's Reliques of Antient Poetry.

Host. Sick of a calm: yea, good sooth.

Fal. So is all her sect5; an they be once in a calm, they are sick.

Dol. You muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me?

Fal. You make fat rascals", mistress Doll.

Dol. I make them! gluttony and diseases make them; I make them not.

Fal. If the cook help to make the gluttony, you help to make the diseases, Doll: we catch of you, Doll, we catch of you; grant that, my poor virtue, grant that.

Dol. Ay, marry; our chains, and our jewels.

Fal. Your brooches, pearls, and owches ;-for to serve bravely, is to come halting off, you know: To come off the breach with his pike bent bravely, and to surgery bravely; to venture upon the charged chambers bravely:

8

Dol. Hang yourself, you muddy conger, hang yourself!

Host. By my troth, this is the old fashion; you two never meet, but you fall to some discord: you are both, in good truth, as rheumatick9 as two dry

5 Steevens is right in his assertion that sect and sex were anciently synonymous; the instances of the use of the one for the other are too numerous for it to have been a mere vulgar corruption.

6 Falstaff alludes to a phrase of the forest. Rascall (says Puttenham, p. 150) is properly the hunting term given to young deer leane and out of season, and not to people,

7 Falstaff gives these splendid names to something very different from gems and ornaments, as we still use carbuncle. The passage, as Johnson observed, is not deserving of further illus

tration.

8 To understand this quibble it is necessary to remember that a chamber signifies not only an apartment, but a small piece of ordnance.

9 Mrs. Quickly means splenetic. It should be remarked, however, that rheum seems to have been a cant word for spleen. In