i.
Editorial
Introduction
to the
Merry Drollery, Complete:
1661, 1691.
| Malvolio.— | “My Masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an alehouse of my Lady’s house, that ye squeak out your Coziers’ Catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, in you? |
| Sir Toby.— | We did keep time, Sir, in our Catches. Sneck up! |
| •••••• | |
| Maria.— | Sometimes he is a kind of Puritan. |
| Sir Andrew.— | O, if I thought that, I’d beat him like a dog. |
| Sir Toby.— | What, for being a Puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear Knight? |
| Sir Andrew.— | I have no exquisite reason for ’t, but I have reason good enough.”—(Twelfth Night. Act ii. sc. 3.) |
§ 1. Merry Drollery, 1661.
When the four “Lovers of Wit” collected these Jovial Poems, Merry Songs, and Witty Drolleries, not forgetting what are rightly called pleasant Catches, and produced them as “Merry Drollery” in 1661, they gave us no more of preface or advertisement than the few lines following
b
the
