The modern slang, "Do you see anything green in my eye?" can hardly, I suppose, be called in evidence on the question of beauty or ugliness. Is there any more to be found in favour of "green eyes?"
Harry Leroy Temple.
SHAKSPEARE CORRESPONDENCE.
On the Death of Falstaff (Vol. viii., p. 314.).—The remarks of your correspondents J. B. and Nemo on this subject are so obvious, and I think I may also admit in a measure so just, that it appears to me only respectful to them, and to all who may feel reluctant to give up Theobald's reading, that I should give some detailed reason for dissenting from their conclusion.
In the first place, when Falstaff began to "play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends," it was no far-fetched thought to place him in fancy among green fields; and if the disputed passage were in immediate connexion with the above, the argument in its favour would be stronger. But, unfortunately, Mrs. Quickly brings in here the conclusion at which she arrives: "I knew there was but one way; for," she adds, as a farther reason, and referring to the physical evidences upon his frame of the approach of death, "his nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green frieze." We can hardly imagine him "babbling" at this moment. "How now, Sir John, quoth I;" she continues, apparently to rouse him: "What, man! be of good cheer. So [thus roused] 'a cried out—God, God, God! three or four times: now, I to comfort him," &c. Does this look as though he were in the happy state of mind your correspondents imagine? I take no account of his crying out of sack and of women, &c., as that might have been at an earlier period. At the same time it does not follow, had Shakspeare intended to replace him in fancy amid the scenes of his youth, that he should have talked of them. A man who is (or imagines he is) in green fields, does not talk about green fields, however he may enjoy them. Both your correspondents seem to anticipate this difficulty, and meet it by supposing Falstaff to be "babbling snatches of hymns;" but this I conceive to be far beyond the limits of reasonable conjecture. In fact, the whole of their very beautiful theory rests upon the very disputed passage in question. At an earlier period apparently, his mind did wander; when, as Mrs. Quickly says, he was "rheumatick," meaning doubtless lunatic, that is, delirious; and then he talked of other things. When he began to "fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends," though for a moment he might have fancied himself even "in his mother's lap," or anything else, he was clearly past all "babbling." In saying this, I treat Falstaff as a human being who lived and died, and whose actions were recorded by the faithfullest observer of Nature that ever wrote.
Samuel Hickson.
Passage in "Tempest."—
"Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
Which spongy April at thy best betrims,