Anne. Good mother, do not marry me to yond' fool.

Mrs. Page. I mean it not; I seek you a better husband.

Quick. That's my master, master doctor.

Anne. Alas, I had rather be set quick i' the earth, And bowl'd to death with turnips.

Mrs. Page. Come, trouble not yourself: Good master Fenton,

I will not be your friend, nor enemy.

My daughter will I question how she loves you,
And as I find her, so am I affected;

'Till then, farewell, sir:-she must needs go in;
Her father will be angry.

[Exeunt MRS. PAGE and ANNE. Fent. Farewell, gentle mistress; farewell, Nan. Quick. This is my doing, now:-Nay, said I, will you cast away your child on a fool, and a physician? Look on master Fenton :-this is my doing. Fent. I thank thee; and I pray thee, once 5 tonight

Give my sweet Nan this ring: There's for thy pains.

[Exit.

Quick. Now heaven send thee good fortune! A kind heart he hath: a woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart. But yet, I would my master had mistress Anne; or I would master Slender had her; or, in sooth, I would master Fenton had her: I will do what I can for them all three; for so I have promised, and I'll be as good as my word; but speciously for master Fenton. Well, I must of another errand to Sir John Falstaff from my two mistresses: What a beast am I to slack it? [Exit.

5 i. e. some time to-night.

6 Specially. 7 Neglect.

SCENE V. A Room in the Garter Inn.

Enter FALSTAFF and BARDOLPH.

Fal. Bardolph, I say,

Bard. Here, sir.

Fal. Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in't. [Exit BARD.] Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher's offal; and to be thrown into the Thames? Well; if I be served such another trick, I'll have my brains ta'en out, and butter'd, and give them to a dog for a new year's gift. The rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse1 as they would have drowned a bitch's blind puppies, fifteen i' the litter and you may know by my size, that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down. I had been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and shallow; a death that I abhor; for the water swells a man; and what a thing should I have been, when I had been swelled! I should have been a mountain of mummy.

Re-enter BARDOLPH, with the wine.

Bard. Here's mistress Quickly, sir, to speak with you.

Fal. Come, let me pour in some sack to the Thames water; for my belly's as cold, as if I had swallowed snow-balls for pills to cool the reins. Call her in.

Bard. Come in, woman.

Enter MRS. QUICKLY.

Quick. By your leave; I cry you mercy: Give your worship good-morrow.

Fal. Take away these chalices; Go brew me a pottle of sack finely.

Bar. With eggs, sir?

Fal. Simple of itself; I'll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.[Exit BARDOLPH.]-How now?

Quick. Marry, sir, I come to your worship from mistress Ford.

Fal. Mistress Ford! I have had ford enough: I was thrown into the ford: I have my belly full of ford.

Quick. Alas the day! good heart, that was not her fault; she does so take on with her men; they mistook their erection.

Fal. So did I mine, to build upon a foolish woman's promise.

Quick. Well, she laments, sir, for it, that it would yearn your heart to see it. Her husband goes this morning a birding; she desires you once more to come to her between eight and nine: I must carry her word quickly: she'll make you amends, I warrant you.

Fal. Well, I will visit her: Tell her so; and bid her think what a man is: let her consider his frailty, and then judge of my merit.

Quick. I will tell her.

Fal. Do so. Between nine and ten say'st thou? Quick. Eight and nine, sir.

Fal. Well, be gone: I will not miss her.

Quick. Peace be with you, sir!

[Exit.

Fal. I marvel, I hear not of master Brook; he sent me word to stay within; I like his money well. O, here he comes.

Fal. Now, master Brook? you come to know what

hath passed between me and Ford's wife?

Ford. That, indeed, Sir John, is my business.

Fal. Master Brook, I will not lie to you; at her house the hour she appointed me. Ford. And how sped you, sir!

Fal. Very ill-favouredly, master Brook.

I was

Ford. How so, sir? Did she change her determination?

Fal. No, master Brook; but the peaking cornuto, her husband, master Brook, dwelling in a continual 'larum of jealousy, comes me in the instant of our encounter, after we had embraced, kissed, protested, and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy; and at his heels a rabble of his companions, thither provoked and instigated by his distemper, and, forsooth, to search his house for his wife's love.

Ford. What, while you were there?

Fal. While I was there.

Ford. And did he search for you, and could not find you?

Fal. You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes in one mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford's approach; and, by her invention, and Ford's wife's distraction3, they conveyed me into a buckbasket.

Ford. A buck-basket?

Fal. By the Lord, a buck-basket: rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, and greasy napkins; that, master Brook, there was the rankest compound of villanous smell, that ever offended nostril.

Ford. And how long lay you there?

Fal. Nay, you shall hear, master Brook, what I have suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good. Being thus crammed in the basket, a couple

3 M. Mason proposes to read direction, but perhaps the change is not necessary.

of Ford's knaves, his hinds, were called forth by their mistress, to carry me in the name of foul clothes to Datchet-lane: they took me on their shoulders; met the jealous knave their master in the door; who asked them once or twice what they had in their basket: I quaked for fear, lest the lunatic knave would have searched it; but Fate, ordaining he should be a cuckold, held his hand. Well; on went he for a search, and away went I for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, master Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths; first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten bellwether: next, to be compassed like a good bilbo 5, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head: and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that,—a man of my kidney, think of that; that am as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw; it was a miracle to 'scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing hot,

4 WITH, BY, and OF were used indiscriminately with much licence by our ancestors. Thus in a subsequent passage of this play we have:

'I sooner would suspect the sun with cold.' Detected appears to have been used in the sense of suspected, impeached. Cavendish, in his Metrical Visions, has this very phrase-detected with, for impeached WITH, or held in suspicion

BY:

"What is he of our bloode that wold not be sory To heare our names WITH vile fame so detected." Detected must have the same meaning here, for Falstaff was not discovered, but suspected BY the jealous Ford. Some modern editors have unwarrantably substituted by for with.

5 A Bilbo is a Spanish blade remarkable for its temper and flexibility. The best were made at Bilboa, a town in Biscay.