CHIEF JUSTICE.
Well, I am loath to gall a new-healed wound. Your day’s service at Shrewsbury hath a little gilded over your night’s exploit on Gad’s Hill. You may thank th’ unquiet time for your quiet o’er-posting that action.
FALSTAFF.
My lord!
CHIEF JUSTICE.
But since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf.
FALSTAFF.
To wake a wolf is as bad as smell a fox.
CHIEF JUSTICE.
What! You are as a candle, the better part burnt out.
FALSTAFF.
A wassail candle, my lord, all tallow. If I did say of wax, my growth would approve the truth.
CHIEF JUSTICE.
There is not a white hair in your face but should have his effect of gravity.
FALSTAFF.
His effect of gravy, gravy, gravy.
CHIEF JUSTICE.
You follow the young prince up and down, like his ill angel.
FALSTAFF.
Not so, my lord, your ill angel is light, but I hope he that looks upon me will take me without weighing. And yet in some respects, I grant, I cannot go. I cannot tell. Virtue is of so little regard in these costermongers’ times that true valour is turned bearherd; pregnancy is made a tapster, and hath his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings. All the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young; you do measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls, and we that are in the vaward of our youth, I must confess, are wags too.