better be hanged: You hunt-counter", hence! avaunt!

ATTEN. Sir, my lord would speak with you.

CH. JUST. Sir John Falstaff, a word with you. FAL. My good lord!-God give your lordship good time of day. I am glad to see your lordship abroad: I heard say, your lordship was sick: I hope, your lordship goes abroad by advice. Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, hath yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time; and I most humbly beseech your lordship, to have a reverend care of your health.

CH. JUST. Sir John, I sent for you before your expedition to Shrewsbury.

FAL. An't please your lordship, I hear, his majesty is returned with some discomfort from Wales.

3-hunt-counter,]

That is, blunderer. He does not, I think, allude to any relation between the judge's servant and the counter-prison. JOHNSON.

Dr. Johnson's explanation may be countenanced by the following passage in Ben Jonson's Tale of a Tub:

Do you mean to make a hare

"Of me, to hunt counter thus, and make these doubles, "And you mean no such thing as you send about? " Again, in Hamlet:

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O, this is counter, you false Danish dogs."

It should not, however, be concealed, that Randle Holme, in his Academy of Armory and Blazon, book iii. ch. 3, says: "Hunt counter, when hounds hunt it by the heel." STEEVENS.

Hunt counter means, base tyke, or worthless dog. There can be no reason why Falstaff should call the attendant a blunderer, but he seems very anxious to prove him a rascal. After all, it is not impossible the word may be found to signify a catchpole or bum-bailiff. He was probably the Judge's tipstaff. RITSON.

Perhaps the epithet hunt-counter is applied to the officer, in reference to his having reverted to Falstaff's salvo. HENLEY.

I think it much more probable that Falstaff means to allude to the counter-prison. Sir T. Overbury, in his character of A Serjeant's Yeoman, 1616, (in modern language, a bailiff's follower,) calls him " a counter-rat." MALONE.

CH. JUST. I talk not of his majesty :-You would not come when I sent for you.

FAL. And I hear moreover, his highness is fallen into this same whoreson apoplexy.

CH. JUST. Well, heaven mend him! I pray you, let me speak with you.

FAL. This apoplexy is, as I take it, a kind of lethargy, an't please your lordship *; a kind of† sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling.

CH. JUST. What tell you me of it? be it as it is. FAL. It hath its original from much grief; from study, and perturbation of the brain: I have read the cause of his effects in Galen; it is a kind of deafness.

CH. JUST. I think, you are fallen into the disease; for you hear not what I say to you.

FAL. Very well, my lord, very well*: rather, an't

* Folio omits, an't please your lordship.

† Folio omits, kind of.

4 Fal. Very well, my lord, very well:] In the quarto edition, printed in 1609, this speech stands thus:

"Old. Very well, my lord, very well:

I had not observed this, when I wrote my note to The First Part of Henry IV. concerning the tradition of Falstaff's character having been first called Oldcastle. This almost amounts to a selfevident proof of the thing being so: and that the play, being printed from the stage manuscript, Oldcastle had been all along altered into Falstaff, except in this single place by an oversight; of which the printers not being aware, continued these initial traces of the original name. THEOBALD.

I am unconvinced by Mr. Theobald's remark. Old. might have been the beginning of some actor's name. Thus we have Kempe and Cowley, instead of Dogberry and Verges, in the 4to. edit. of Much Ado About Nothing, 1600.

Names utterly unconnected with the Personæ Dramatis of Shakspeare, are sometimes introduced as entering on the stage. Thus, in The Second Part of King Henry IV. edit. 1600::- "Enter th' Archbishop, Thomas Mowbray, (Earle Marshall,) the Lord Hastings, Faulconbridge, and Bardolphe." Sig. B 4.-Again: "Enter the Prince, Poynes, Sir John Russell, with others." Sig. C 3. Again, in King Henry V. 1600: "Enter Burbon, Constable, Orleance, Gebon." Sig. D 2.

Old might have been inserted by a mistake of the same kind;

please you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.

CH. JUST. To punish you by the heels, would amend the attention of your ears; and I care not, if I do become your physician.

FAL. I am as poor as Job, my lord; but not so patient: your lordship may minister the potion of imprisonment to me, in respect of poverty; but how I should be your patient to follow your pre

or indeed through the laziness of compositors, who occasionally permit the letters that form such names as frequently occur, to remain together, when the rest of the page is distributed. Thus it will sometimes happen that one name is substituted for another. This observation will be well understood by those who have been engaged in long attendance on a printing-house; and those to whom my remark appears obscure, need not to lament their ignorance, as this kind of knowledge is usually purchased at the expence of much time, patience, and disappointment.

In 1778, when the foregoing observations first appeared, they had been abundantly provoked. Justice, however, obliges me to subjoin, that no other part of the same censure can equitably fall on the printing-office or compositors engaged in our present republication. STEEVENS.

I entirely agree with Mr. Steevens in thinking that Mr. Theobald's remark is of no weight. Having already discussed the subject very fully, it is here only necessary to refer the reader to vol. xvi. p. 410, et seq. in which I think I have shewn that there is no proof whatsoever that Falstaff ever was called Oldcastle in these plays. The letters prefixed to this speech crept into the first quarto copy, I have no doubt, merely from Oldcastle being behind the scenes, the familiar theatrical appellation of Falstaff, who was his stage-successor. All the actors, copyists, &c. were undoubtedly well acquainted with the former character, and probably used the two names indiscriminately.-Mr. Steevens's suggestion that Old. might have been the beginning of some actor's name does not appear to me probable; because in the list of "the names of the principal actors in all these plays" prefixed to the first folio, there is no actor whose name begins with this syllable; and we may be sure that the part of Falstaff was performed by a principal actor. MALONE.

Principal actors, as at present, might have been often changing from one play-house to another; and the names of such of them as had quitted the company of Hemings and Condell, might therefore have been purposely omitted, when the list prefixed to the folio 1623 was drawn up. STEEVENS.

scriptions, the wise may make some dram of a scruple, or, indeed, a scruple itself.

CH. JUST. I sent for you, when there were matters against you for your life, to come speak with me.

FAL. As I was then advised by my learned counsel in the laws of this land-service, I did not come. CH. JUST. Well, the truth is, sir John, you live in great infamy.

FAL. He that buckles him in my belt, cannot live in less.

CH. JUST. Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.

FAL. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater, and my waist slenderer.

CH. JUST. You have misled the youthful prince. FAL. The young prince hath misled me: I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog 5.

CH. JUST. Well, I am loath to gall a new-healed wound; your day's service at Shrewsbury hath a little gilded over your night's exploit on Gads-hill : you may thank the unquiet time for your quiet o'er-posting that action.

FAL. My lord?

CH. JUST. But since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf.

5

he my dog.] I do not understand this joke. Dogs lead the blind, but why does a dog lead the fat? JOHNSON.

If the fellow's great belly prevented him from seeing his way, he would want a dog as well as a blind man. FARMER.

And though he had no absolute occasion for him, Shakspeare would still have supplied him with one. He seems to have been very little solicitous that his comparisons should answer completely on both sides. It was enough for him that men were sometimes led by dogs. MALONE.

The allusion was probably to some well-known character of the time. Ben Jonson, in his Discoveries, has an anecdote of a notorious thief of the day, who was remarkable for his great belly. A little more information respecting this person might perhaps identify him with the character here alluded to. TALBOT.

FAL. To wake a wolf, is as bad as to smell a fox. CH. JUST. What! you are as a candle, the better part burnt out.

FAL. A wassel candle, my lord; all tallow: if I did say of wax, my growth would approve the truth.

CH. JUST. There is not a white hair on your face, but should have his effect of gravity.

FAL. His effect of gravy, gravy, gravy.

CH. JUST. You follow the young prince up and down, like his ill angel'.

FAL. Not so, my lord; your ill angel is light; but, I hope, he that looks upon me, will take me

6 A wassel candle, &c.] A wassel candle is a large candle lighted up at a feast. There is a poor quibble upon the word wax, which signifies increase as well as the matter of the honey-comb. JOHNSON.

The same quibble has already occurred in Love's Labour's Lost, Act V. Sc. II.:

"That was the way to make his godhead wax."

STEEVENS.

7 You follow the young prince up and down, like his ILL ANGEL.] Thus the quarto, 1600. Mr. Pope reads with the folio, 1623,-" evil angel." STEEVENS.

What a precious collator has Mr. Pope approved himself in this passage! Besides, if this were the true reading, Falstaff could not have made the witty and humorous evasion he has done in his reply. I have restored the reading of the oldest quarto. The Lord Chief Justice calls Falstaff the Prince's ill angel or genius: which Falstaff turns off by saying, an ill angel (meaning the coin called an angel) is light; but, surely, it cannot be said that he wants weight: ergo the inference is obvious. Now money may be called ill, or bad; but it is never called evil, with regard to its being under weight. This Mr. Pope will facetiously call restoring lost puns: but if the author wrote a pun, and it happens to be lost in an editor's indolence, I shall, in spite of his grimace, venture at bringing it back to light. THEOBALD.

"As light as a clipt angel," is a comparison frequently used in the old comedies. So, in Ram-Alley, or Merry Tricks, 1611: The law speaks profit, does it not ?Faith, some bad angels haunt us now and then."

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STEEVENS.