(g)-If dad will get it frank'd

An ingenious friend has suggested to me, that for get it frank'd we should read frank it. Polonius, it must be remembered, was a privy-counsellor, and consequently enjoyed the privilege of franking ex officio.

POPE.

Notwithstanding the plausibility of this suggestion, the present reading may be the right one. In a Tretys offe Fraunckynge," bl. let. 1589, Syr Edouarde Gulle is noticed as 66 destraynt offe hys Fraunckes for divers unduetyfulle Libertys ynne y, useage thereoffe." pp. 1342–3. As it happened in the time of our author, may not this be a satirical allusion to the circumstance?

(h)-A flannel under-petticoat

STEEVENS.

In this last admonition of Laertes to Ophelia, our author doubtless intends a sarcasm on a practice very prevalent in his time, but which has long since become obsolete: I mean the omission of the petticoat as an article of female habiliment. Something similar occurs in a MS. entitled, "Brytchet her Goolden Rules," deposited in the Museum, dated 1506.-" Albeit 1 graunte ye Kyrtel thyn and slyte ys myghtelie favourynge toe a faunciefule dysplaye offe yr fayre shapis,

nonne ye more wod ytte bee hydden bie ye onder Gaurmente offe Flaunnyn, and then wdst thou haue wherewithall toe deffend thie Lymbes from ye rothlesse Ayr: moreouer thou wdst profyt therebie ynne divers Waies." STEEVENS.

(i)-Jack Frost

An elegant prosopopeia of cold.

WARBURTON.

Jack Frost is, I believe, a very powerful agent in the Scandinavian mythology.-He is a personage of no little importance in many of the traditionary stories of the north.

MALONE.

(k)-My watch says twelve

That

accu

Horatio says, 'tis half past eleven at most. Marcellus's watch indigitates the time more rately than Horatio's, is proved by the appearance of the ghost; as it is well known that ghosts are never disincarcerated until midnight.

For a man to wear a good watch, although there be neither a moral obligation nor a physical necessity,— yet he who, disdaining the equivocating offspring of Geneva, carries one whose motions are regulated with

rigid scrupulosity, and whose information is delivered with oracular veracity, deserves praise, and merits commendation.

JOHNSON.

There is so surprising a display of intellect in this observation, that I shall forbear to question the truth of the position.

(1)- Rig

A row; a kick-up.

STEEVENS.

STEEVENS.

Rig is not, strictly, a row, but rather a go; in which sense it is used in another part of this play.

(m) You'd better hold your jaw

JOHNSON.

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.

(n)-Paws off

Poeticè,-hands off.

STEEVENS.

WARBURTON.

(0)-Gab

i. e. Mag, or jaw. See the " jaw. See the "Slang Dictionary." St.

Giles's Edition.

(p)-To blow

JOHNSON.

This word, powerful and expressive, has several significations: 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,

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 pa

G

ramour;* but a reference to the registers of the Heralds' College, places it beyond all doubt that he was the person represented by the figure which I 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 republish them in thirteen volumes quarto, with additional observations on Merry Andrew, Little Jack Horner, and the whole of the dramatis persone of the Nursery mythology.

STEEVENS.

(s)-What's the row?

I have ventured to restore this from the old copies : in the later ones I find, what now?

(t)

Needs must

STEEVENS.

The remainder of this old proverb is preserved in the

* See Mr. Tollet's Essay on Fools' Caps, or, as he very gravely calls it, his Opinion concerning the Morris-Dancers upon his Window.—— ANNOTATIONS, HEN. IV. PART I.