Scene 5. Page 448.
Bour. Let him go hence, and with his cap in hand,
Like a base pander, hold the chamber door, &c.
This is an allusion to the conduct of Pandarus when he introduced Troilus to his niece Cressida's chamber. See the story as related by Chaucer.
ACT V.
Page 470.
Chor. ... Like a mighty whiffler, 'fore the king
Seems to prepare his way.
Some errors have crept into the remarks on this word which require correction. It is by no means, as Hanmer had conceived, a corruption from the French huissier. He was apparently misled by the resemblance which the office of a whiffler bore in modern times to that of an usher. The term is undoubtedly borrowed from whiffle, another name for a fife or small flute; for whifflers were originally those who preceded armies or processions as fifers or pipers. Representations of them occur among the prints of the magnificent triumph of Maximilian I. In a note on Othello, Act III. Scene 2, Mr. Warton had supposed that whiffler came from what he calls "the old French viffleur;" but it is presumed that that language does not supply any such word, and that the use of it in the quotation from Rymer's fœdera is nothing more than a vitiated orthography. In process of time the term whiffler, which had always been used in the sense of a fifer, came to signify any person who went before in a procession. Minsheu, in his Dictionary, 1617, defines him to be a club or staff-bearer. Sometimes the whifflers carried white staves, as in the annual feast of the printers, founders, and ink-makers, so curiously described in Randle Holme's Academy of armory, book iii. ch. 3, where one of them is stated to have carried in his right hand a great bowl of white wine and sugar. Another mistake occurs in Mr. Warton's note, when he says, that "by degrees the word whiffler hence acquired the metaphorical meaning which it at present obtains in common speech, and became an appellation of contempt." This is by no means the case, for whiffler, in its sense of a babbler, trifler, or versatile person, is pure Saxon, ƿæꝼleꞃe, blatero.