Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/144

 gun-cases, or to keep the tongs in. This reminds us that Falstaff said you might have thrust Shallow, "and all his apparel, into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court."

In the same style of minifying a thing by magnifying its minuteness, he says, "If I were sawed into quantities, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermit's staves as Master Shallow." Then he delights himself with fancying how he will riot over the slim subject and endow it with every imaginable chance for provoking laughter: "I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter, the wearing out of six fashions. Oh, it is much that a lie with a slight oath, and a jest with a sad brow, will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders! Oh, you shall see him laugh, till his face be like a wet cloak ill laid up!"

A lie with an oath not always slight, "and a jest with a sad brow," is a prophecy of America which Mr. Sumner might have incorporated among his other classic Voices.

The country also supplies specimens of a wild-cat oratory in whose bombast Shakspeare might have recognized an element of his own imagination. I am not certain whether the following is genuine, or possesses only the truth of verisimilitude: "Build a worm-fence around the winter's supply of summer weather; skim the clouds from the sky with a teaspoon; catch a thunder-cloud in a bladder; break a hurricane to harness; ground-sluice an earthquake; lasso an avalanche;