(m)-You'd better hold your jaw The folio reads mag; but I adopt jaw (from the quarto) as the more elegant, and as being more in the spirit of our author. STEEVENS. (n)-Paws off Poetice pro-hands off. WARBURTON. (0)-Gab i.e. Mag, or jaw. See the " Slang Dictionary,” St. Giles's edition. (P)-To blow JOHNSON. This word, powerful and expressive, has several sig. nifications: its present meaning is to turn nose, to divulge. JOHNSON. (q)-That diddled me The true reading I believe to be, "that did me." To do a person, is to cheat him. F POPE Diddled is correct. To do, and to diddle, mean the same. JOHNSON. (r)—Merry Andrew My friend, the glazier, is of opinion that Merry Andrew was a distant relation of Maid Marian's gentleman-usher, or, as I conceive him to have been, her paramour*. Be this as it may, a reference to the registers of the Heralds' College, places it beyond all doubt that Merry Andrew is the person represented by the figure which I formerly mistook for Tom the Piper, in my friend's painted window. If the public are not yet surfeited with the remarks of myself and the other ingenious commentators on the Old Vice, Maid Marian, the Morris Dancers, &c.&c. &c. I shall re-publish them in thirteen volumes quarto, with additional observations on Merry Andrew, Little Jack Horner, and the whole of the dramatis persona of the Nursery mythology. STEEVENS. * See Mr. Tollet's Essay on Fool's Caps, or, as he very gravely calls it, his Opinion concerning the Morris-Dancers upon his Window. ANNOTATIONS. HEN. IV. Part I. (s)-What's the row? I have ventured to restore this from the old copies : in the later ones I find, what now? STEEVENS, (t)-Needs must The remainder of this old proverb is preserved in the pathetic ballad of the "Two Louers theyr melancolie Partynge."-Dr. Humbug's Reliques, vol. 94: "To leve thee here, mie Alys dere, "Needs must when the Devyll dryueth." The meaning of Rosencrantz seems to me to be this: 'We (Guildenstern and myself) have no alternative; were we to refuse attendance upon your mere invitation, you could then compel it by the interposition of the royal authority.' MALONE. ANNOTATIONS. ACT THE SECOND. (a)-Non compos mentis. THE scraps of Latin, which we find scattered throughout our author's works, do not, in my opinion, furnish us with any substantial proof of his acquaintance with the learned languages; for it is certain that Ben Jonson, with whom he was once upon terms of the closest intimacy, not only furnished him with all the Latin he required, but even translated into English such Latin passages as accidentally came in his way. This is incontrovertibly proved by the following anecdote: "Our poet was god-father to one of Ben Jonson's "children; and, after the christening, being in deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up, and asked him 66 |