On the contrary, if he would prosper, let him "Set up shop on the Goodwin sands," a most unpromising locality, one would imagine, until we realise that the saw-maker means "good win." "As plain as the Dunstable road" sounds straightforward enough, especially when we recall that Dunstable is on Watling Street, one of the noble main roads of the Romans; but the humour (save the mark!) of the thing is in the play on the idea of "dunce." In "Redgauntlet" we read: "If this is not plain speaking, there is no such place as downright Dunstable"--_i.e._ the meaning of the remark is so plain that even a mere fool, the veriest dunce, could not fail to grasp it. In Lincolnshire, when anyone is not over-acute, they delicately say, "He was born at Little Wittham," hence the cause of his having so little wit: the actual spelling is Witham. On the decease of anyone it is said, "He is gone to Deadham." In Sussex, if a man were slow over his work, they would say, "He is none of Hastings," the idea of haste being somehow involved. The dwellers in the little town of Ware were pleased to say that it was "worth all London." Fuller, who wrote a delightful folio on the counties of England, says: "This, I assure you, is a masterpiece of the vulgar wits in this county, wherewith they endeavour to amuse travellers. The fallacy lieth in the homonymy of Ware, here not taken for that town so named, but appellatively for all vendible commodities." In the fen districts the frogs are called "Cambridgeshire nightingales." At night, and especially before rain, the frogs make a tremendous croaking. At Ripley, in Surrey, where there is a pond near the village, we have heard them called "The town band." To be "stabbed with a Bridport dagger" was a delicate way of saying that a man had been hanged. The best hemp used to be grown round this Dorsetshire town, and the place was famous for its manufacture of rope; in fact, an ancient statute was long in force requiring that the cables for the royal navy should be made there. To be "As thin as Banbury cheese" was a favourite simile with our ancestors. Bardolph, it will be recalled, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," compares Slender to a Banbury cheese. In "Jack Drum's Entertainment," 1601, we find: "Put off your cloathes and you are like a Banbury cheese, nothing but paring"; while, in a pamphlet issued in 1664, on "The Sad Condition of the Clergy," we read, "Our lands and glebes are clipped and pared to become as thin as Banbury Cheese."[156:A] Another cheese that became proverbial was that of Suffolk. It was locally called "Bang" or "Thump." "Unrivall'd stands thy county cheese, O Giles! Whose very name alone engenders smiles, Whose fame abroad by every tongue is spoke, The well-known butt of many a flinty joke; Its name derision and reproach pursue, And strangers tell of three times skimm'd sky-blue." --_Blomfield._