We get a sidelight on the importance of the pensioners in "The Merry Wives of Windsor"[26] when _Dame Quickly_ tells _Falstaff_ a great cock-and-bull story about the visitors who have called on _Mistress_ _Ford_. "There have been knights and lords and gentlemen with their coaches, letter after letter, gift after gift; smelling so sweetly (all musk) and so rushling, I warrant you in silk and gold; and yet there has been earls, and, what is more, _pensioners_!" Shakespeare also speaks of "the freckled cowslip" in "Henry V,"[27] when the _Duke of Burgundy_ refers to The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip. All poets love the flower. In the language wherewith spring Letters cowslips on the hill, writes Tennyson--a charming fancy! Sydney Dobell has a quaint flower song containing this verse: Then came the cowslip Like a dancer in the fair, She spread her little mat of green And on it dancèd she, With a fillet bound about her brow, A fillet round her happy brow, A golden fillet round her brow, And rubies in her hair. [26] Act II, Scene II. [27] Act V, Scene II. Never mind if country dancers rarely wear rubies; the idea is pretty and on Shakespeare's authority we know that rubies do gleam in the cup of the cowslip, as he has told us through the lips of the fairy. With great appreciation of the beauty of the flower he has _Jachimo's_ description: Cinque-spotted like the crimson drops In the bottom of a cowslip.[28] [28] "Cymbeline"; Act II, Scene II. Most sympathetically did Dr. Forbes Watson, when lying on a bed of fatal illness, put into words what many persons have felt regarding this flower: