Ang. This touches me in reputation :Either consent to pay this sum for me, Or I attach you by this officer.

Ant. E. Consent to pay thee that I never had!
Arrest me, foolish fellow, if thou dar'st.

Ang. Here is thy fee; arrest him officer;-
I would not spare my brother in this case,
If he should scorn me so apparently.

Offi. I do arrest you, sir; you hear the suit.
Ant. E. I do obey thee, till I give thee bail:-
But, sirrah, you shall buy this sport as dear
As all the metal in your shop will answer.

Ang. Sir, sir, I shall have law in Ephesus,
To your notorious shame, I doubt it not.

Enter DROMIO of Syracuse.

Dro. S. Master, there is a bark of Epidamnum,
That stays but till her owner comes aboard,
And then, sir, bears away:7 our fraughtage, sir,
I have convey'd aboard; and I have bought
The oil, the balsamum, and aqua-vitæ.
The ship is in her trim; the merry wind

Blows fair from land: they stay for nought at all,
But for their owner, master, and yourself.

Ant. E. How now! a madman? Why thou peevish sheep, 8

What ship of Epidamnum stays for me?

Dro. S. A ship you sent me to, to hire waftage. Ant. E. Thou drunken slave, I sent thee for a rope; And told thee to what purpose, and what end.

Dro. S. You sent me, sir, for a rope's-end as soon:9 You sent me to the bay, sir, for a bark.

Ant. E. I will debate this matter at more leisure,

7 And then, sir, bears away:] The old copy redundantly readsAnd then, sir, she bears away. Steevens.

8

thou peevish sheep,] Peevish is silly. So, in Cymbeline: "Desire my man's abode where I did leave him:

And teach your ears to listen with more heed.
To Adriana, villain, hie thee straight;

Give her this key, and tell her, in the desk
That's cover'd o'er with Turkish tapestry,
There is a purse of ducats; let her send it;
Tell her, I am arrested in the street,

And that shall bail me: hie thee, slave; be gone.
On, officer, to prison till it come.

[Exeunt Mer. ANG. Offi. and ANT. E.
Dro. S. To Adriana! that is where we din'd,
Where Dowsabel did claim me for her husband:
She is too big, I hope, for me to compass.
Thither I must, although against my will,
For servants must their masters' minds fulfil.

SCENE II.

The same.

Enter ADRIANA and LUCIANA.

Adr. Ah, Luciana, did he tempt thee so? Might'st thou perceive austerely in his eye That he did plead in earnest, yea or no?

[Exit.

Look'd he or red, or pale; or sad, or merrily?

What observation mad'st thou in this case,

Of his heart's meteors tilting in his face?1

1

Luc. First, he denied you had in him no right.
Adr. He meant, he did me none; the more my spite.

meteors tilting in his face?] Alluding to those meteors in the sky, which have the appearance of lines of armies meeting in the shock. To this appearance he compares civil wars in another place-King Henry IV, P. I, sc. i:

"Which like the meteors of a troubled heaven,

"All of one nature, of one substance bred,

"Did lately meet in the intestine shock

"And furious close of civil butchery." Warburton.

The allusion is more clearly explained by the following comparison in the second Book of Paradise Lost:

"As when, to warn proud cities, war appears

"Wag'd in the troubled sky, and armies rush
"To battle in the clouds, before each van

Steevens.

"Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears "Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms "From either end of heaven the welkin burns." The original copy reads-Oh, his heart's meteors, &c. The correction was made in the second folio. Malone.

Luc. Then swore he, that he was a stranger here. Adr. And true he swore, though yet forsworn he were. Luc. Then pleaded I for you.

Adr.

And what said he? Luc. That love I begg'd for you, he begg'd of me. Adr. With what persuasion did he tempt thy love? Luc. With words, that in an honest suit might move. First, he did praise my beauty; then, my speech. Adr. Didst speak him fair? Luc.

Have patience, I beseech.

Adr. I cannot, nor I will not, hold me still;

My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will.
He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere,2
Ill-fac'd, worse-bodied, shapeless every where:
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind;
Stigmatical in making,3 worse in mind.

Luc. Who would be jealous then of such a one?
No evil lost is wail'd when it is gone.

Adr. Ah! but I think him better than I say,

And yet would herein others' eyes were worse: Far from her nest the lapwing cries away;4

2

My heart prays for him, though my tongue do

curse.

Enter DROMIO of Syracuse.

Dro. S. Here, go; the desk, the purse; sweet now, make haste.

sere,] That is, dry, withered. Johnson.

So, in Milton's Lycidas: “— ivy never sere." Steevens.

3 Stigmatical in making,] That is, marked or stigmatized by nature with deformity, as a token of his vicious disposition.

So, in The Wonder of a Kingdom, 1635:
"If you spy any man that hath a look,

Johnson.

Stigmatically drawn, like to a fury's," &c. Steevens. 4 Far from her nest the lapwing &c.] This expression seems to be proverbial-I have met with it in many of the old comick writers. Greene, in his second Part of Coney-Catching, 1592, says,-"But again to our priggers, who, as before I said, cry with the lapwing farthest from the nest, and from their place of residence where their most abode is."

Nash, speaking of Gabriel Harvey, says "he withdraweth men, lapwing-like, from his nest, as much as might be."

See this passage yet more amply explained in a note on Measure for Measure, Vol. III, p. 337, n. 4. Steevens.

Luc. How hast thou lost thy breath?

Dro. S.

By running fast. Adr. Where is thy master, Dromio? is he well? Dro. S. No, he 's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell: A devil in an everlasting garments hath him, One, whose hard heart is button'd up with steel; A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough;

A wolf, nay, worse, a fellow all in buff;

A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands

The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands;7

an everlasting garment-] The sergeants, in those days, were clad in buff, as Dromio tells us the man was who arrested Antipholus. Buff is also a cant expression for a man's skin, a covering which lasts him as long as his life. Dromio therefore calls buff an everlasting garment: and in pursuance of this quibble on the word buff, he calls the sergeant, in the next scene, the "Picture of old Adam;" that is, of Adam before his fall, whilst he remained unclad: "What, have you got the picture of old Adam new apparelled?”

So, in The Woman-Hater, Pandar says,—" Were it not for my smooth citizen, I'd quit this transitory trade, get me an everlasting robe, and turn sergeant." M. Mason.

6 A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough;] Dromio here bringing word in haste that his master is arrested, describes the bailiff by names proper to raise horror and detestation of such a creature, such as, a devil, a fiend, a wolf, &c. But how does fairy come up to these terrible ideas? we should read, a fiend, a fury, &c. Theobald. There were fairies like hobgoblins, pitiless and rough, and described as malevolent and mischievous. Johnson.

So, Milton:

"No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine,

"Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity." Malone. It is true that there is a species of malevolent and mischievous Fairies; but Fairy, as it here stands, is generical. T. Warton.

7 A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, &c. of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands;] It should be written, I think, narrow lanes, as he has the same expression in King Richard II, Act V, sc. vi:

"Even such they say as stand in narrow lanes." Grey. The preceding rhyme forbids us to read-lanes. Lands, I be lieve, in the present instance, mean, what we now call landingplaces at the water-side.

A shoulder-clapper is a bailiff. So, in Decker's Satiremastix, 1602:

fear none but these same shoulder-clappers."

Steevens

A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well; One that, before the judgment, carries poor souls to

hell.9

Narrow lands is certainly the true reading, as not only the rhyme points out, but the sense; for as a creek is a narrow water, forming an inlet from the main body into the neighbouring shore, so a narrow-land is an outlet or tongue of the shore that runs into the water. Besides, narrow Lanes and Alleys are synonymous. Henley.

8 A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well;] To run counter is to run backward, by mistaking the course of the animal pursued; to draw dry-foot is, I believe, to pursue by the track or prick of the foot; to run counter and draw dry-foot well are, therefore, inconsistent. The jest consists in the ambiguity of the word counter, which means the wrong way in the chace, and a prison in London. The officer that a rested him was a sergeant of the counter. For the congruity of this jest with the scene of action, let our author answer. Johnson.

Ben Jonson has the same expression-Every Man in his Humour, Act II, sc. iv: "Well, the truth is, my old master intends to follow my young, dry-foot over Moorfields to London this morning," &c.

To draw dry-foot, is when the dog pursues the game by the scent of the foot: for which the blood-hound is famed. Grey. So, in Ram-Alley, or Merry Tricks:

"A hunting, Sir Oliver, and dry-foot too!" Again, in The Dumb Knight, 1633:

"I care not for dry-foot hunting."

Steevens.

A hound that draws dry-foot, means what is usually called a blood-hound, trained to follow men by the scent. The expression occurs in an Irish statute of the 10th of William III, for preservation of the game, which enacts, that all persons licensed for making and training up of setting dogs, shall, in every two years, during the continuance of their license, be compelled to train up, teach, and make, one or more hounds, to hunt on dryfoot. The practice of keeping blood-hounds was long continued in Ireland, and they were found of great use in detecting murderers and robbers. M. Mason.

poor souls to hell. Hell was the cant term for an obscure dungeon in any of our prisons. It is mentioned in The CounterRat, a poem, 1658:

In Wood-street's-hole, or Poultry's hell."

The dark place into which a tailor throws his shreds, is still in possession of this title. So, in Decker's If this be not a good Play, the Devil is in it, 1612:

"They scorn thy hell, having better of their own."

There was likewise a place of this name under the Exchequer Chamber, where the king's debtors were confined till they had "paid the uttermost farthing." Steevens.