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mile. There parting with her, I gave her (besides her skin full of drink) an English crown to buy more drink; for, good wench, she was in a piteous heat: my kindness she requited with dropping some dozen of short curtsies, and bidding God bless the dancer. I bade her adieu; and to give her her due, she had a good ear, danced truly, and we parted friendly."

10 SCENE II.-"Do you cry, 'O Lord, sir,' at your whipping?" &c.

The now vulgar expression "O Lord, sir," was for a long time the fashionable phrase, and has been ridiculed by other writers. The whip

ping of a domestic fool was not an uncommon Occurrence. Sir Dudley Carleton writes to Mr. Winwood, in 1604,-"There was great execution done lately upon Stone, the fool, who was well whipped in Bridewell for a blasphemous speech, that there went sixty fools into Spain besides my lord admiral and his two sons. But he is now at liberty again, and for that unexpected release gives his lordship the praise of a very pitiful lord."-("Memoirs of the Peers,' by Sir E. Brydges.)

"SCENE III.-"The scarfs and the bannerels about thee," &c.

Parolles, from this, and several passages of a similar nature, appears to have been intended for a great coxcomb in dress; and Lafeu here compares his trappings to the gaudy decorations of a pleasure-vessel, not "of too great a burthen." Hall, in his 'Satires' (b. iv. s. 6), has described a soldier so scarfed :

"The sturdy ploughman doth the soldier see
All scarfed with pied colours to the knee,

Whom Indian pillage hath made fortunate; And now he 'gins to loath his former state."

12 SCENE V.-"Like him that leaped into the custard."

Ben Jonson has a passage which well illustrates this::

"He may perchance, in tail of a sheriff's dinner,
Skip with a rhyme on the table, from New-nothing,
And take his Almain-leap into a custard,
Shall make my lady mayoress and her sisters
Laugh all their hoods over their shoulders."

Devil is an Ass, Act I., Scene 1.

The leaper into the custard was the city fool. Gifford has a note on the above passage of Jonson, which we copy:-"Our old dramatists abound with pleasant allusions to the enormous size of their 'quaking custards,' which were served up at the city feasts, and with which such gross fooleries were played. Thus Glap

thorne :

'I'll write the city annals

In metre, which shall far surpass Sir Guy Of Warwick's history, or John Stow's, upon The custard, with the four-and-twenty nooks At my lord mayor's feast.'-Wit in a Constable. Indeed, no common supply was required; for, besides what the corporation (great devourers of custard) consumed on the spot, it appears that it was thought no breach of city manners to send or take some of it home with them for the use of their ladies. In the excellent old play quoted above, Clara twits her uncle with this practice :

'Nor shall you, sir, as 't is a frequent custom, 'Cause you 're a worthy alderman of a ward, Feed me with custard and perpetual white broth, Sent from the lord mayor's feast, and kept ten days, Till a new dinner from the common-hall Supply the large defect.'"

ACT III.

13 SCENE II.-" Smoky muskets." PORTABLE fire-arms, according to Sir Samuel Meyrick, were first used by the Lucquese in 1430. The hand-cannon, and the hand-gun, were little more than tubes of brass fitted on a piece of wood, and fired with a match held in the hand. In a French translation of Quintus Curtius, written in 1468, and preserved amongst the Burney MSS. in the British Museum, we find the earliest representations of hand fire

arms which are known. In the next page is a copy of part of an illumination in this volume.

The arquebus conveyed the match to the pan by a trigger. This was the first great improvement in portable fire-arms. The following description of the musquet is extracted from the 'Penny Cyclopædia' (Art. Arms) :—

"The musquet was a Spanish invention. It is said to have first made its appearance at the battle of Pavia, and to have contributed in an especial manner to decide the fortune of the

day.

Its use, however, seems for a while to have been confined. It appears not to have been generally adopted till the Duke of Alba took upon himself the government of the Netherlands in 1567. M. de Strozzi, colonel-general of the French infantry under Charles IX., introduced it into France. The first Spanish musquets had straight stocks; the French curved ones. Their form was that of the haquebut, but so long and heavy that something of support was required; and hence orignated the rest, a staff the height of a man's shoulder, with a kind of fork of iron at the top to receive the

musquet, and a ferule at bottom to steady it in the ground. On a march, when the piece was shouldered, the rest was at first carried in the right hand, and subsequently hung upon the wrist by means of a loop tied under its head. A similar rest had been first used by the mounted arquebusiers. In the time of Elizabeth, and long after, the English musqueteer was a most encumbered soldier. He had, besides the unwieldy weapon itself, his coarse powder for loading in a flask; his fine powder for priming in a touch-box; his bullets in a leathern bag, the strings of which he had to draw to get at

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them; while in his hand was his burning match and his musquet-rest; and, when he had discharged his piece, he had to draw his sword in order to defend himself. Hence it became a question for a long time, even among military men, whether the bow did not deserve a preference over the musquet."

14 SCENE VI.-"John Drum's entertainment." There is an old interlude, printed in 1601, called 'Jack Drum's Entertainment;' and it

appears that this species of hospitality to which Jack Drum, or John Drum, or Tom Drum (for he is called by each name), was subjected, consisted in abuse and beating. Holinshed, speaking of the hospitality of the Mayor of Dublin in 1551, says, "No guest had ever a cold or forbidding look from any part of his family; 80 that his jester or any other officer durst not, for both his ears, give the simplest man that resorted to his house Tom Drum his entertainment, which is, to hale a man in by the head, and thrust him out by both the shoulders."

ACT IV.

15 SCENE IV.-"Our waggon is prepar'd." IN 'Love's Labour's Lost,' unquestionably an early play, Shakspere has used the term coach:

"No drop but as a coach doth carry thee."

In The Merry Wives of Windsor,' Mrs. Quickly tells us that "there has been knights, and lords and gentlemen, with their coachescoach after coach, I warrant you." The probability therefore is, that, in using the term waggon in the text, our poet meant a public vehicle. Certainly the early coaches were not much unlike waggons. Mr. Markland, in his interesting paper in the 'Archæologia,' 'On the early Use of Carriages in England' (vol. xx.), has given us a representation from an Ancient Flemish Chronicle of the fifteenth century, in the British Museum (Royal MSS. 16 F. III.), representing Emergard, the wife of Salvard, Lord of Rousillon, driven in a covered cart or

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Stow, in his 'Annals,' speaks of long waggons for passengers and commodities in 1564; and these, he says, were similar to those which travelled in the beginning of the next century to London from Canterbury and other large towns. These, it seems then, in Shak pere's time were called waggons, though they afterwards were occasionally named caravans. As late, however, as 1660, we find from Sir William Dugdale's 'Diary' that his daughter "went towards London in Coventre waggon."

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ACT V.

16 SCENE I.-"Enter a gentle Astringer." AN astringer is a falconer. "They be called

ostringers," says Markham, the great authority on hawking, "which are the keepers of gosshawks or tercells." A "gentle astringer" pro

bably meant the head of the king's hawking | rank in his household. The grand falconer of establishment-not a menial, but an officer of England is a noble.

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THE Costume of this play, for anything that appears to the contrary, might be either of the age of Boccaccio or of Shakspere. The Florentines and the Siennois were continually at strife during the middle ages, and the mention of a "Duke of Austria" would, strictly, place its date anterior to 1457, Ladislaus, the last Duke of Austria, having died King of Hungary and Bohemia in that year; whilst the allusion to Austria, as a power per se would drive the period of action still farther back amongst the dukes and margraves of the twelfth and thir-, teenth centuries. It is our opinion, however, that in all cases where there is no positive violence committed against history-where the

foundation of the plot is either fanciful or legendary-the nearest possible period to that of the writing of the play should be fixed upon as that of its action, as by so doing the best illustration is obtained of the author's ideas and the manners of the age which he depicted. With this view we should place the date of All 's Well that Ends Well' just previous to 1557, in which year, on the 3rd of July, Sienna was given to Cosmo de Medicis, Grand Duke of Tuscany, by Philip of Spain, who had been invested with its sovereignty by his father Charles V. The last war between the Florentines and the Siennois, and in which the former were supported by the troops of the emperor,

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