"HOBS. No, good fellows be thieves."
[127] Henry Baker was therefore the name of the actor who performed the part of Vertumnus.
[128] The joke here consists in the similarity of sound between despatch and batch, Will Summers mistaking, or pretending to mistake, in consequence.
[129] [Old copy, Sybalites.]
[130] This is still, as it was formerly, the mode of describing the awkward bowing of the lower class. In the "Death of Robert Earl of Huntington," 1601, when Will Brand, a vulgar assassin, is introduced to the king, the stage direction to the actor in the margin is, "Make Legs."
[131] A proverb in [Heywood's "Epigrams," 1562. See Hazlitt's "Proverbs," 1869, p. 270. Old copy, love me a little.]
[132] [Old copy, deny.]
[133] The meaning of the word snudge is easily guessed in this place, but it is completely explained by T. Wilson, in his "Rhetoric," 1553, when he is speaking of a figure he calls diminution, or moderating the censure applied to vices by assimilating them to the nearest virtues: thus he would call "a snudge or pynche-penny a good husband, a thrifty man" (fo. 67). Elsewhere he remarks: "Some riche snudges, having great wealth, go with their hose out at heels, their shoes out at toes, and their cotes out at both elbowes; for who can tell if such men are worth a grote when their apparel is so homely, and all their behavior so base?" (fo. 86.) The word is found in Todd's Johnson, where Coles is cited to show that snudge means "one who hides himself in a house to do mischief." No examples of the employment of the word by any of our writers are subjoined.
[134] Mr Steevens, in a note to "Hamlet," act iv. sc. 5, says that he thinks Shakespeare took the expression of hugger-mugger there used from North's Plutarch, but it was in such common use at the time that twenty authors could be easily quoted who employ it: it is found in Ascham, Sir J. Harington, Greene, Nash, Dekker, Tourneur, Ford, &c. In "The Merry Devil of Edmonton" also is the following line—
"But you will to this gear in hugger-mugger."