William Shakespeare: King Henry IV Part II

ACT I. 2. SCENE II. London. A street.

[Enter Falstaff, with his Page bearing his sword and buckler.]

FALSTAFF.
Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my water?

PAGE.
He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water; but,
for the party that owed it, he might have moe diseases than he
knew for.

FALSTAFF.
Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me: the brain of
this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent any thing
that tends to laughter, more than I invent or is invented on me:
I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.
I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her
litter but one.
If the prince put thee into my service for any other reason than to
set me off, why then I have no judgement. Thou whoreson mandrake, thou
art fitter to be worn in my cap than to wait at my heels. I was never
manned with an agate till now: but I will inset you neither in gold nor
silver, but in vile apparel, and send you back again to your master, for
a jewel,--the juvenal, the prince your master, whose chin is not yet
fledged. I will sooner have a beard grow in the palm of my hand than he
shall get one on his cheek; and yet he will not stick to say his face is
a face-royal: God may finish it when he will, 'tis not a hair amiss yet:
he may keep it still at a face-royal, for a barber shall never earn
sixpence out of it; and yet he'll be crowing as if he had writ man ever
since his father was a bachelor. He may keep his own grace, but he's
almost out of mine, I can assure him. What said Master Dombledon about
the satin for my short cloak and my slops?

PAGE.
He said, sir, you should procure him better assurance than Bardolph:
he would not take his band and yours; he liked not the security.