2nd S. VII. April 23. '59.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



333 



tend, prove that at some time Shakspeare had 

 seen — 



"The hand of Mars 

 Beckoning M'ith fiery truncheon his retire," 

 let nie remind the reader that the fact of his 

 having served under Leicester would go far to 

 explain how he gained much of that familiarity 

 with other things for which his writings are te- 

 raarkable. 



Thus, what he had observed when on shipboard, 

 while on his way to the Low Countries and back 

 (and let me pomt to a line in Coriolanus as an 

 evidence of that observation, — 



" As waves before a vessel under sail, 

 So men obej'M, and fell below his stem,") 



may well have furnished him with that knowledge 

 of seamanship discoverable in many of his plays, 

 a knowledge which can only be acquired by those 

 who go down to the sea in ships. His familiarity 

 with the good points of ahorse, and he is admitted 

 to have described them with a skill which no other 

 poet has ever attained to, — so that when he talks 

 of horses, we see them 



" Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth," — 

 was probably acquired where " the army of the 

 Queen had got the field." And we may here add, 

 that if, as has been supposed from the allusions in 

 his 37th and 89th Sonnets, he was lame • — 

 " Made lame by Fortune's dearest spite " — 



the accident may well have happened to him while 

 sharing in some of those encounters from witness- 

 ing which, as I believe, he acquired that know- 

 ledge of military matters of which his writings 

 contain such abundant evidence. 



William J. Thoms. 

 {To he concluded in our next.) 



SHAKSPEARE S " TWELFTH NIGHT. 



Every reader of " N. & Q." will remember the 

 scene in this comedy in which Sir Toby Belch, 

 Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the Clown, are intro- 

 duced carousing ; with the proposal of the former 

 that they "rouse the night owl in a catch" — the 

 ready acquiescence of Sir Andrevf — his sugges- 

 tion that the catch be " T?ioti knave" — the pre- 

 tended scruples of the Clown to joining therein on 

 the ground of being constrained in the perform- 

 ance to call the knight knave — the putting aside 

 the objection by Sir Andrew — and finally, the 

 singing of a catch, the words of which are not 

 given in the printed copies of the play. For the 

 words however we are at no loss, inasmuch as they 

 were printed with the music (in Shakspeare's life- 

 time) in a work (now lying before me), edited by 

 Thomas Ravenscroft, and published in 1609, with 

 the title of 



" Deuteromelia : or, The Second Part of Musick's Me- 



lodie, or Melodius Musicke, Of Pleasant Roundelaies ; K. 

 H. mirth, or Freemen's Songs, and such delightful! 

 Catches." 



The humour of the catch consists in the words, 

 " Hold thy peace, I pri'thee, hold thy peace, thou 

 knave," being so adjusted to the music, that the 

 three singers in turn call one another knave ; the 

 epithet when used by one being instantly retorted 

 on him by another. Attention was long since 

 directed to this catch by Sir John Hawkins in his 

 History of Music, wherein he gave a copy of it in 

 score (a form which makes the joke more readily 

 apparent to the eye than that adopted in the ori- 

 ginal publication), and which has more recently 

 been copied by Mr. Knight, and possibly by other 

 editors of Shakspeare. 



My purpose is to invite attention to a very 

 curious allusion to this catch contained in a pam- 

 phlet published in 1649, copious extracts from 

 which appear in Mr. Morley's recently published 

 Memoirs of Bartholomeio Fair. This tract, which 

 bears the title of 



" A Bartholomew Fairing, New, New, New : Sent from 

 the raised Siege before Dublin, as a Preparatory Present 

 to the Great Thanksgiving Day. To be communicated 

 onely to Independents." 



was a royalist production intended to ridicule the 

 Puritans, and is in the form of a play. In one 

 scene Mr. Lerned, Mr. Olduns, and Mr. Bew, 

 three Puritan ministers, are represented accom- 

 panying three citizens' wives on a pleasure trip to 

 the New Park at Richmond ; the ladies being at- 

 tended by Ralph and Roger, two of their hus- 

 bands' apprentices. Whilst the party are regaling 

 themselves in the park, the conversation of the 

 ministers turns on the opinions which are ex- 

 pressed by the opposite party of some of their 

 brethren, and the following dialogue takes place : — 

 " Mr. Lerned. * * * To good Sir Nat. 



3Ir. Bew. The malignants say he is an ass. 



Mr. L. He ? An ass ? And so am I. 



Mr, Olduns. And I. 



Mr. B. And I. So they say Cheynell and Wilkinson 

 are mad. 



Mr. L. They mad ? And so am I. 



Mr. O. And I. 



Mr. B. And I. Nay, they stick not to speak unreve- 

 rently of Dr. Reynolds and Dr. Harris, and call them hy- 

 pocrites, and dissembling knaves. 



Mr. L. They knaves ? So am I. 



Mr. O. And I. 



3Ir. B. And I. 



Roger. This was the best tope yet ; had it been sung, 

 it would have gone to the tune of Thou Knave excellently 

 well." 



Now, as Mr. Morley has passed over this allu- 

 sion without the slightest notice (either not per- 

 ceiving it, or deeming it unnecessary to remark 

 on it,) 1 ask leave, with all deference, to make one 

 or two observations on it. 



We may, I think, reasonably conclude that no 

 allusion would be made in a publication intended 

 for circulation in the meridian of Bartholomew 



