Sir Nicholas is in spirits again when making love to one whom he considers a woman of rank and fortune. No cavalier could then vie with him in finery. “I protest,” he says, “I was at least at sixteen brokers, before I could put myself exactly in the fashion.” But with all this, he is a craven again when he is called upon to enter and address her who awaits the wooing with impatience. “Come!” he exclaims, “I will go to the tavern and swallow two whole quarts of wine instantly; and when I am drunk, ride on a drawer’s back, to visit her.” Wheadle suggests that “some less frolic will do, to begin with.”--“I will cut three drawers over the pate, then,” says the knight, “and go with a tavern-lanthorn before me at noonday;”--just as very mad gallants were wont to do. The liquor has not the effect of rendering Oliver’s knight decent, for in proposing the health of “my lord’s sister,” he does it in the elegant form of “Here’s a brimmer to her then, and all the fleas about her;” offers to break the windows to show his spirit, and in the lady’s very presence exclaims, “Hither am I come to be drunk, that you may see me drunk, and here’s a health to your flannel petticoat.” The latter _gentillesse_ is by way of proof of the knight’s quality, for it was of the very essence of polite manners, when a spirited gentleman drank to a spirited lady, to strain the wine through what the Chesterfields and Mrs. Chapones of that day, if such were to be found, would not have blushed to call “their smocks.” But enough of the way in which the stage represented “one of Oliver’s knights.” He is not worse than the courtiers and gentlemen by whom he is swindled out of his money and into a wife. Nay, nearly the last sentence put into his mouth is, at least, a complimentary testimony to the side of which Sir Nicholas is but an unworthy member. “If I discover this,” he remarks, “I am lost. I shall be ridiculous even to our own party.”--The reader will, probably, not require to be reminded that before Etherege drew Cully, Jonson had depicted Sogliardo, and that the latter, in the very spirit of Oliver’s knight, remarks:--“I do not like the humor of challenge; it may be accepted.”