01ACT III

02SCENE I. The King of Navarre’s park

03Enter Armado the Braggart and Moth his Boy.

04ARMADO.

05Warble, child, make passionate my sense of hearing.

06MOTH.

07[ Singing .]

08Concolinel.

09ARMADO.

10Sweet air! Go, tenderness of years, take this key, give enlargement to the swain, bring him festinately hither. I must employ him in a letter to my love.

11MOTH.

12Master, will you win your love with a French brawl?

13ARMADO.

14How meanest thou? Brawling in French?

15MOTH.

16No, my complete master; but to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat, as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose, as if you snuffed up love by smelling love; with your hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes, with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit; or your hands in your pocket like a man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. These are compliments, these are humours; these betray nice wenches that would be betrayed without these; and make them men of note—do you note me?—that most are affected to these.

17ARMADO.

18How hast thou purchased this experience?

19MOTH.

20By my penny of observation.

21ARMADO.

22But O—but O—

23MOTH.

24“The hobby-horse is forgot.”