Page 1068 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

SHALLOW

Go to, I have spoke at a word. God keep you. [285]

FALSTAFF
Fare you well, gentle gentlemen. Exeunt [Justices]. On, Bardolph, lead the
men away. [Exeunt all but Falstaff.] As I return, I will fetch off these justices.
I do see the bottom of Justice Shallow. Lord, Lord, how subject we old men

are to this vice of lying! This same [290] starved justice hath done nothing
but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about
Turnbull Street, and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the
Turk’s tribute. I do remember him at Clement’s Inn like a man made after

supper of a cheese-paring. [295] When ’a was naked, he was, for all the
world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a
knife. ’A was so forlorn that his dimensions to any thick sight were invincible.
’A was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores

[300] called him mandrake. ’A came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and
sung those tunes to the overscutched huswives that he heard the carmen
whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights. And now is this
Vice’s dagger become a squire, and talks as familiarly of [305] John a Gaunt

as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I’ll be sworn ’a ne’er saw him but
once in the Tiltyard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the
marshal’s men. I saw it, and told John a Gaunt he beat his own name, for you
might have thrust him and all his [310] apparel into an eel-skin, the case of a

treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court. And now has he land and
beefs. Well, I’ll be acquainted with him, if I return, and ’t shall go hard but I
will make him a philosopher’s two stones to me. If the young dace be a bait
for the old pike, [315] I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at

him. Let time shape, and there an end.
Exit.