Strutt, in his antiquarian romance of 'Queen- of the hobby-horse and the dragon and Friar hoo Hall,' has given at length the gambols Tuck.

there is a story of a servant who got a remuneration of three farthings from one of his master's guests, and a guerdon of a shilling from another guest. Perhaps the story had passed into the gossip of the people, and Costard's jocularity was understood by "the gentlemanly profession," who stood on the ground of the Blackfriars theatre or the Globe.

"SCENE I.-" The boy hath sold him a bargain." | the gentlemanly profession of Serving Men," This comedy is running over with allusions to country sports-one of the many proofs that in its original shape it may be assigned to the author's greenest years. The sport which so delights Costard about the fox, the ape, and the humble-bee, has been explained by Capell, whose lumbering and obscure comments upon Shakspere have been pillaged and sneered at by the other commentators. In this instance they take no notice of him. It seems, according to Capell, that "selling a bargain" consisted in drawing a person in by some stratagem to proclaim himself fool by his own lips; and thus, when Moth makes his master repeat the l'envoy ending in the goose, he proclaims himself a goose, according to the rustic wit, which Costard calls "selling a bargain well." "Fast and loose," to which he alludes, was another holiday sport; and the goose that ended the market alludes to the proverb "three women and a goose make a

market."

12 SCENE I.-" Gardon-remuneration." In a tract published in 1578, "A Health to

13 SCENE I." Like a German clock." The Germans were the great clock-makers of the sixteenth century. The clock at Hampton Court, which, according to the inscription, was set up in 1540, is said to be the first ever made in England. Sir Samuel Meyrick possessed a table-clock of German manufacture, the repre

sentations of costume on which show it to be of

the time of Elizabeth. It is most probable that
the German clock,

"Still a repairing; ever out of frame;
And never going aright,"

was of the common kind which we now call
Dutch clocks.

And man that whilst the puppets play,
Through nose expoundeth what they say;
And white oat-eater that does dwell
In stable small at sign of Bell,
That lift up hoof to show the pranks
Taught by magician, styled Banks;
And ape, led captive still in chain
Till he renounce the Pope and Spain:
All these on hoof now trudge from town
To cheat poor turnip-eating clown."

In a poem written in "verse burlesque" by Sir William D'Avenant, entitled 'The Long Vacation in London,' there is a very satisfactory enumeration of the principal sights which were presented to the admiring wayfarers of our city at the period when the Restoration had given back to the people some of their ancient amusements, and the councils of the primitive church were no longer raked up, as they were by old Prynne, to denounce bear-leaders and puppetshowmen as the agents of the evil one,-excom-Southwark Fair' without actual observation; municated persons who were to be dealt with by the strong arm of the law, civil and ecclesiastical. The passage in D'Avenant's poem is as follows:

"Now vaulter good, and dancing lass
On rope, and man that cries Hey, pass!
And tumbler young that needs but stoop,
Lay head to heel to creep through hoop;
And man in chimney hid to dress
Puppet that acts our old Queen Bess,

What a congregation of wonders is here! Hogarth could not have painted his glorious

but here is an assemblage from which a companion picture might be made, offering us the varieties of costume and character which distinguish the age of Charles II. from that of George II. But such sights can only be grouped together now in London upon remarkable occa sions. The London of our own day, including its gigantic suburbs, is not the place to find even in separate localities the vaulter, the

dancing lass, the conjuror, the tumbler, the puppet-show, the raree-show, the learned horse, or the loyal ape. Fleet Street, for example, is much too busy a place for the wonder-mongers to congregate in. A merchant in Ben Jonson's 'Fox'says

""T were a rare motion to be seen in Fleet Street."

activity in the Term, because Fleet Street was then full. When is it now empty? There is no room for their trades. They are elbowed out. We have seen, however, in some half-quiet thoroughfare of Lambeth, or of Clerkenwell, a dingy cloth spread upon the road, and a ring of children called together at the sound of horn,

A motion is another name for a puppet-show. to behold a dancing lass in all the finery of His companion answers,

"Ay, in the Term."

calico trowsers and spangles, and a tumbler with his hoop: and on one occasion sixpence was extracted from our pockets, because the

Fifty years afterwards D'Avenant tells us of his said tumbler had his hoop splendid with ribbons, vagabonds, that in the Long Vacation

"All these on hoof now trudge from town

To cheat poor turnip-eating clown."

The sight-shewers, we thus see, were in high

which showed him to have a reverence for the poetry and antiquity of his calling. He knew the line,

"And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop."

15 SCENE I.

ACT IV.

"Where is the bush

the ships that came into the port of London

"

17 SCENE I.-" Pricket."

Dull contradicts Sir Nathaniel as to the age of the buck. The parson asserts that it was a buck of the first head "-the constable says it was "a pricket." The buck acquires a new name every year as he approaches to maturity. The first year he is a fawn;-the second, a pricket; the third, a sorrell;-the fourth, a soare;-the fifth, a buck of the first head; the sixth, a complete buck.

That we must stand and play the murtherer in ?" | belonged to him.
ROYAL and noble ladies, in the days of Eliza-
beth, delighted in the somewhat unrefined sport
of shooting deer with a cross-bow. In the
"alleys green" of Windsor or of Greenwich
Parks, the queen would take her stand on an
elevated platform, and, as the pricket or the
buck was driven past her, would aim the death-
shaft, amidst the acclamations of her admiring
courtiers. The ladies, it appears, were skilful
enough at this sylvan butchering. Sir Francis
Leake writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury, "Your
lordship has sent me a very great and fat stag,
the welcomer being stricken by your right
honourable lady's hand." The practice was as
old as the romances of the middle ages: but in
those days the ladies were sometimes not so
expert as the Countess of Shrewsbury; for, in
the history of Prince Arthur, a fair huntress
wounds Sir Launcelot of the Lake, instead of
the stag at which she aims.

16 SCENE I.-"A Monarcho."

This allusion is to a mad Italian, commonly called the monarch, whose epitaph, or description, was written by Churchyard, in 1580. His notion was, that he was sovereign of the world; and one of his conceits, recorded by Scot in his 'Discovery of Witchcraft,' 1584, was that all

18 SCENE I.-" Master person." The derivation of parson was, perhaps, commonly understood in Shakspere's time, and parson and person were used indifferently. Blackstone has explained the word: "A parson, persona ecclesiæ, is one that hath full possession of all the rights of a parochial church. He is called parson, persona, because by his person, the church, which is an invisible body, is represented."-Commentaries, b. i.

19 SCENE I.-" Good old Mantuan." The good old Mantuan was Joh. Baptist. Mantuanus, a Carmelite, whose Eclogues were translated into English by George Turbervile, in 1567. His first Eclogue commences with Fauste, precor

gelida; and Farnaby, in his preface to Martial, says that pedants thought more highly of the Fauste, precor gelidâ, than of the Arma virum que cano. Here, again, the unlearned Shakspere hits the mark when he meddles with learned matters.

20 SCENE I.-" Venetia."

A proverbial expression applied to Venice, which we find thus in Howell's Letters:"Venetia, Venetia, chi non te vede, non te pregia, Ma chi t'ha troppo veduto le dispregia."

21 SCENE III.—" On a day," &c. This ode, as Shakspere terms it, was set to music upwards of seventy years ago, by Jackson, of Exeter, for three men's voices; and a more beautiful, finished, and masterly composition, of the kind, the English school of music cannot produce:-for that we have a school, and one of which we need not be ashamed, will soon cease to be denied.

more accurate than this description. The Ghe-
bers, as the elegant poet of 'Lalla Rookh' tells
us, were not blind Idolators; they worshipped
the Creator in the most splendid of his works:-
"Yes,-I am of that impious race,

Those Slaves of Fire who, morn and even,
Hail their Creator's dwelling-place
Among the living lights of heaven!"

23 SCENE III.-" For when would you, my liege,

or you, or you."

It will be observed that this line is almost a repetition of a previous one

"For when would you, my lord, or you, or you;" and in the same manner throughout this speech the most emphatic parts of the reasoning are repeated with variations. Upon this, conjecture goes to work; and it is pronounced that the lines are unnecessarily repeated. Some of the commentators understood little of rhythm, and they were not very accurate judges of rhetoric. One of the greatest evidences of skill in an

22 SCENE III.—" That, like a rude and savage orator is the enforcement of an idea by repe

man of Inde."

tition, without repeating the precise form of its original announcement. The speech of Ulysses, in the third act of Troilus and Cressida,'

Shakspere might have found an account of the Ghebers, or fire-worshippers of the East, in some of the travellers whose works had preceded Hakluyt's collection. Nothing can be finer or is a wonderful example of this art.

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet on his back,"

ACT V.

24 SCENE I.-" Honorificabilitudinitatibus."

making the pedant have the worst of it in what

TAYLOR, the water-poet, has given us a syllable he calls "a quick venew of wit."

more of this delight of schoolboys-honorificicabilitudinitatibus. But he has not equalled Rabelais, who has thus furnished the title of a book that might puzzle Paternoster Row:Antipericatametaparhengedamphicribrationes.

25 SCENE I." The fifth, if I."

The pedant asks who is the silly sheep-quis, quis? "The third of the five vowels if you repeat them," says Moth; and the pedant does repeat them-a, e, I; the other two clinches it, says Moth, o, u (O you). This may appear a poor conundrum, and a low conceit, as Theobald has it, but the satire is in opposing the pedantry of the boy to the pedantry of the man, and

26 SCENE I.-" Venew of wit." Steevens and Malone fiercely contradict each other as to the meaning of the word venew. "The cut-and-thrust notes on this occasion exhibit a complete match between the two great Shaksperian maisters of defence," says Douce. This industrious commentator gives us five pages to determine the controversy; the argument of which amounts to this, that venew and bout equally denote a hit in fencing.