be probably inferred from a speech in The Shoemaker's Holiday, 4to. 1610: "-Away, firke, scowre thy throat, thou shalt wash it with Gastilian licuor." HENLEY, 157. Accost, Sir Andrew, accost.] To accost had a signification in our author's time that the word now seems to have lost. In the second part of The English Dictionary, by H. C. 1655, in which the reader, "who is desirous of a more refined and elegant speech," is furnished with hard words, "to draw near," is explained thus: "To accost, appropriate, appropinquate." See also Cotgrave's Dict. in verb. accoster. MALONE. 164. Accost, is, front her, board her,—] I hinted that board was the better reading. Mr. Steevens supposed it should then be bourd with her; but to the authorities which I have quoted for that reading in Jonson, Catiline, act I. sc. iv. we may add the following: "I'll bourd him straight; how now Cornelio?" All Fools, act v. sc. i. "He brings in a parasite, that flowteth, and bourdeth them thus." Nash's Lenten Stuff, 1599. "I can board when I see occasion." 'Tis pity She's a Whore, p. 38. WHALLEY. I am still unconvinced that board (the naval term) is not the proper reading. It is sufficiently familiar to our author in other places. So in the Merry Wives, act ii. sc. i. "unless he knew 'some strain in me, that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury. 4 "Mrs. "Mrs. Ford. Boarding, call you it? I'll be sure to keep him above deck," &c. &c. STEEVENS. Probably board her, may mean no more than salute her, speak to her, &c. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his Treatise of Bodies, 1643, fo. Paris, p. 253, speaking of a blind man says, "He would at the first abord of a stranger as soone as he spoke to him, frame a right apprehension of his stature, bulke, and manner of making." REED. 181. It's dry, sir.] What is the jest of dry hand, I know not any better than Sir Andrew. It may possibly mean, a hand with no money in it; or, according to the rules of physiognomy, she may intend to insinuate, that it is not a lover's hand, a moist hand being vulgarly accounted a sign of an amorous constitution. JOHNSON. "But to say you had a dull eye, a sharp nose (the visible marks of a shrew); a dry hand, which is the sign of a bad liver, as he said you were, being toward a husband too, this was intolerable." Monsieur, D'Olive, 1606. Again, in Decker's Honest Whore, 1635 :“Of all dryfisted knights, I cannot abide that he should touch me." Again, in Westward-Hoe, by Decker and Webster, 1606: "Let her marry a man of a melancholy complection, she shall not be much troubled by him. My husband has a hand as dry as his brains," &c. The Chief Justice likewise, in the second part of K. Hen. IV. enumerates a dry hand among the characteristicks of debility and age. Again, in Antony and not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot scratch mine ear." All these passages will serve to confirm Dr. Johnson's latter supposition. STEEVENS. 206. In former copies :- -thou seest, it will not cool my nature.] The emendation by Theobald. STEEVENS. 226. and yet I will not compare with an old man.] Ague-check, though willing enough to arrogate to himself such experience as is commonly the acquisition of age, is yet careful to exempt his person from being compared with its bodily weakness. In short, he would say with Falstaff:- "I am old in nothing but my understanding." STEEVENS. 235. -mistress Mall's picture?- -] The real name of the woman whom I suppose to have been meant by Sir Toby, was Mary Frith. The appellation by which she was generally known, was Mall Cutpurse. She was at once an hermaphrodite, a prostitute, a bawd, a bully, a thief, a receiver of stolen goods, &c. &c. On the books of the Stationers' Company, August 1610, is entered-" A Book called the Madde Prancks of Merry Mall of the Bankside, with her walks in man's apparel, and to what purpose. Written by John Day." Middleton and Decker wrote a comedy, of which she is the heroine. In this, they have given a very flattering representation of her, as they observe in their preface, that "it is the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds them." The The title of the piece is―The Roaring Girl, or, Moll Cut-purse; as it hath been lately acted on the Fortune Stage, by the Prince his Players, 1611. The frontispiece to it contains a full length of her in man's clothes, smoaking tobacco. Nath. Field, in his Amends for Ladies, another comedy, 1618, gives the following character of her: 66 -Hence lewd impudent, "I know not what to term thee, man or woman, "For nature, shaming to acknowledge thee "For either, hath produced thee to the world "Without a sex: Some say that thou art woman; "Others, a man: to many thou art both "Woman and man; but I think rather neither; "Or man, or horse, as Centaur old was feign'd." A life of this woman was likewise published, 12mo. in 1662, with her portrait before it in a male habit; an ape, a lion, and an eagle before her. As this extraordinary personage appears to have partook of both sexes, the curtain which Sir Toby mentions would not have been unnecessarily drawn before such a picture of her as might have been exhibited in an age, of which neither too much delicacy or decency was the characteristick. STEEVENS. It appears from many passages in the old English plays, that, in our author's time, curtains were hung before all pictures of any value. So, in Vittoria Corombona, a tragedy, by Webster, 1612: "I yet but draw the curtain picture." -now to your In a MS. letter in the British Museum, from John Chamberlain to Mr. Carlton, dated Feb. 2, 1611-12, the following account is given of this woman's doing penance: "This last Sunday Moll Cutpurse, a notorious baggage that used to go in man's apparel, and challenged the field of diverse gallants, was brought to the same place [Paul's Cross], where she wept bitterly, and seemed very penitent; but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippel'd of three quarts of sack, before she came to her penance. She had the daintiest preacher or ghostly father that ever I saw in the pulpit, one Radcliffe, of Brazen Nose College in Oxford, a likelier man to have led the revels in some inn of court, than to be where he was. But the best is, he did extreme badly, and so wearied the audience that the best part went away, and the rest tarried rather to hear Moll Cutpurse than him.” MALONE. 238. -a sink a-pace,- -] i. e. a cinque-pace; the name of a dance, the measures whereof are regulated by the number five. The word occurs elsewhere in our author. 243. SIR J. HAWKINS. -flame-coloured stock. -] The old copy Stockings were in reads- Shakspere's time, called stocks. So, in Jack Drum's -or would my silk stock should lose his gloss else." The same solicitude concerning the furniture of the legs |