Enter Falstaff.
Here comes lean Jack, here comes bare-bone. How now, my sweet creature of bombast? How long is’t ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?
FALSTAFF.
My own knee? When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle’s talon in the waist. I could have crept into any alderman’s thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder. There’s villanous news abroad: here was Sir John Bracy from your father; you must to the court in the morning. That same mad fellow of the north, Percy, and he of Wales that gave Amamon the bastinado, and made Lucifer cuckold, and swore the devil his true liegeman upon the cross of a Welsh hook—what a plague call you him?
POINS.
O, Glendower.
FALSTAFF.
Owen, Owen, the same; and his son-in-law Mortimer, and old Northumberland, and that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, that runs a-horseback up a hill perpendicular—
PRINCE.
He that rides at high speed, and with his pistol kills a sparrow flying.
FALSTAFF.
You have hit it.
PRINCE.
So did he never the sparrow.
FALSTAFF.
Well, that rascal hath good metal in him, he will not run.
PRINCE.
Why, what a rascal art thou then, to praise him so for running!