——Come, let me wipe thy face!'
Do you not imagine you see the pursy Prince, purring and blowing and sweating with the exertion he had made, and 'larding the lean earth,' like another Falstaff almost? Nay, the very words, 'Come let me wipe thy face,' are addressed by Doll Tearsheet to Falstaff, when he was heated by his pursuit of Pistol:—'Alas, poor ape, how thou sweatest! Come, let me wipe thy face.' Hem!" (quoth Mr. Henry Augustus Constantine Stubbs) "I have done—and pause for a reply."
"You'll be horribly laughed at," said McCrab, "if you do make Hamlet a fat little fellow."
"Shall I?" exclaimed Stubbs, with a contented chuckle, and rubbing his hands "shall I be horribly laughed at?"
"Ay," replied McCrab, "and gloriously gibbetted the next day, in all the papers, for your Sancho Panza exhibition."
"Pooh!" ejaculated Stubbs, "pooh! pooh! what care I for the rascally papers? Don't I know what sort of critics they are who guide the public taste, and fulminate their mighty WE in the columns of a newspaper."
(To be concluded in our next.)