Falstaff says
Fare you well, gentle gentlemen.
(Exeunt Justices)
On, Bardolph; lead the men away.
(Exeunt BARDOLPH, Recruits, & c)
As I return, I will fetch off these justices: I do
see the bottom of Justice Shallow. Lord, Lord, how
subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This
same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to
me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he
hath done about Turnbull Street: and every third
word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk’s
tribute. I do remember him at Clement’s Inn like a
man made after supper of a cheese-paring: when a’
was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked
radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it
with a knife: a’ was so forlorn, that his
dimensions to any thick sight were invincible: a’
was the very genius of famine; yet lecherous as a
monkey, and the whores called him mandrake: a’ came
ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those
tunes to the overscutched huswives that he heard the
carmen whistle, and swear they were his fancies or
his good-nights. And now is this Vice’s dagger
become a squire, and talks as familiarly of John a
Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him; and
I’ll be sworn a’ ne’er saw him but once in the
Tilt-yard; and then he burst his head for crowding
among the marshal’s men. I saw it, and told John a
Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have
thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; the
case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a
court: and now has he land and beefs. Well, I’ll
be acquainted with him, if I return; and it shall
go hard but I will make him a philosopher’s two
stones to me: if the young dace be a bait for the
old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I
may snap at him. Let time shape, and there an end.