The Clown is not only quaint, droll, full of banter, sly with sense, like clowns in the other plays, but he is the most ebullient with spirits of them all, ready for the next freak, to dissemble himself in the curate's gown and carry on two voices with Malvolio in the prison, keeping him on the rack the while, or to carouse with the two knights till daybreak, and delight them with manufacturing burlesques. "Thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus: 'twas very good, i' faith. I sent thee sixpence for thy leman: hadst it?" Feste resumes the burlesquing humor: "I did impeticos thy gratillity; for Malvolio's nose is no whipstock: my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses." As for "bottle-ale," the phrase occurs once more in Shakspeare, 2 "Henry IV.," ii. 4, to express contempt,--"Away, you bottle-ale rascal!" So Feste does not think small-beer of the Myrmidons, or retainers of Olivia, who might scent out his sixpence as quickly as Malvolio. Was the bottling of ale just coming in, to the immense disgust of the loyal Briton, who thought nobly of the ancient brew and would not have it save mightily on tap? The words, "Pigrogromitus," "Vapians," "Queubus," sound like the names which Rabelais manufactured to cover his sly allusions to public personages; but they cannot be traced. It is just possible that Shakspeare invented them to burlesque the words and style which mariners and travellers brought home to vapor with to eager listeners in the taverns: marvels of the East that would not stay in Damascus, but came by caravan,--of Virginia, Guiana, and the "still-vex'd Bermoothes," the "Anthropophaginian,"[9] men "whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," not positively discredited by Sir Walter Raleigh; one-leg and one-foot savages, seen by early sailors to the coast of Maine,--all the misunderstanding and exaggeration of a new period of adventure and discovery of new lands were bountifully nourished upon sack and canary in the London taverns. What legends were fabricated at the Mitre in Cheapside, the Swan at Dowgate, the Boar's Head near London Stone, the Ship at the Exchange, the Red Lion in the Strand! These were haunts of Frobisher's and Drake's men; of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's, fresh from Newfoundland in the only ship that was saved; of Barbour's expedition to Roanoake in 1584; of Gosnold's, in 1602, to Cape Cod and the islands in Buzzard's Bay. The sack grew apprehensive and forgetive, and justified Falstaff's eulogy. Bermoothes was not the only region vexed by devils and spirits, but every tavern from Plymouth to London. A trace of Shakspeare's interest in these London entertainments is found in the "Tempest," where Trinculo wishes that he had Caliban in England for a show. "There would this monster make a man: any strange beast there makes a man; when they will not