"Punk! you souc'd gurnet!"

STEEVENS.

79-a struck fowl, or a hurt wild duck.] The repetition of the same image disposed Sir Thomas Hanmer, and after him Dr. Warburton, to read, in opposition to all the copies, a struck deer, which is indeed a proper expression, but not likely to have been corrupted. Shakspeare, perhaps, wrote a struck sorel, which, being negligently read by a man not skilled in hunter's language, was easily changed to struck fowl. Sorel is used in Love's Labour's lost for a young deer; and the terms of the chace were, in our author's time, familiar to the ears of every gentleman.

JOHNSON.

80-an old-faced ancient:] is an old standard mended with a different colour.

STEEVENS.

81-this sealed brief,] brief is letter, German. 82 Peace, chewet, peace,] a chewet, Mr. Theobald says, is a noisy, chattering bird, a pie.

83 As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo's bird-] The cuckow's chicken, who, being hatched and fed by the sparrow, in whose nest the cuckow's egg was laid, grows in time able to devour her nurse. JOHNSON.

84 and bestride me-] In the battle of Agincourt, Henry, when king, did this act of friendship for his brother the duke of Gloucester. STEEVENS.

85-Esperance!-] This was the word of battle on Percy's side. See Hall's Chronicle, folio 22.

POPE.

86-here's no vanity I-] In our author's time the negative, in a common speech, was used to design,

ironically, the excess of a thing. Thus Ben Jonson, in Every Man in his Humour, says,

"O here's no foppery!

"'Death, I can endure the stocks better." Meaning, as the passage shews, that the foppery was excessive. And so in many other places. But the Oxford Editor not apprehending this, has altered it to there's vanity.

WARBURTON.

87 Turk Gregory-] Meaning Gregory the Seventh, called Hildebrand. This furious friar surmounted almost invincible obstacles to deprive the emperor of his right of investiture of bishops, which his predecessors had long attempted in vain. Fox, in his history, had made this Gregory so odious, that I don't doubt but the good Protestants of that time were well pleased to hear him thus characterized, as uniting the attributes of their two great enemies, the Turk and Pope, in one.

WARBURTON.

88 -so fat a deer-] The reading of the first edition, and of the other quartos, is fair, the first folio has fat, which was followed by all the editors.

There is in these lines a very natural mixture of the serious and ludicrous, produced by the view of Percy and Falstaff. I wish all play on words had been forborn,

JOHNSON.