"The flee is a lyttell worme, and greveth men mooste; and scapeth and voideth peril with lepynge and not with runnynge, and wexeth slowe and fayleth in colde tyme, and in somer tyme it wexeth quiver and swyft; and spareth not kynges."
[214]. "I Loved a Lass."
George Wither, says Aubrey, could make verses as fast as he could write them. So, too, could Shakespeare. "What he thought," said his editors, "he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarse received from him a blot in his papers."
Still:—"So, So-a! fair and softly!" said the old Shropshire farmer to Job his plough-horse when he kicked up his heels as if to break into a gallop; "So, So-a! When thou'rt a racer, my dear, or born a high-blood Arab, there'll be time enough for that. Some goes their best slow."
If the lass's "fives" in the fourth stanza (of 214) were the fives of to-day she must have had a quite comfortable foot, a size or two larger, at any rate, than the bride's in Sir John Suckling's Ballad upon a Wedding:
... Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they feared the light;
But oh, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter-day