welfth Night" (ii. 3),
Sir Toby says to the Clown:

"Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs."

In days gone by, too, it was customary for the servants of the nobility,
particularly the gentleman-usher, to attend bare-headed. In the
procession to the trial in "Henry VIII." (ii. 4), one of the persons
enumerated is a gentleman-usher "bare-headed." On grand occasions,
coachmen, also, drove bare-headed, a practice alluded to in Beaumont and
Fletcher's "Woman-Hater" (iii. 2):

"Or a pleated lock, or a bareheaded coachman,
This sits like a sign where great ladies are
To be sold within."

_Sheriffs' Post._ At the doors of sheriffs were usually set up
ornamental posts, on which royal and civic proclamations were fixed. So,
in "Twelfth Night" (i. 5), Malvolio says: "He'll stand at your door like
a sheriff's post." "A pair of mayors' posts," says Staunton, "are still
standing in Norwich, which, from the initials T. P., and the date 159,
are conjectured to have belonged to Thomas Pettys, who was mayor of that
city in 1592."

_Shoeing-Horn._ This, from its convenient use in drawing on a tight
shoe, was applied in a jocular metaphor to other subservient and
tractable assistants. Thus Thersites, in "Troilus and Cressida" (v. 1),
in his railing mood gives this name to Menelaus, whom he calls "a
thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's [Agamemnon]
leg."

It was also employed as a contemptuous name for danglers on young women.

In the same way "shoe-tye" became a characteristic name for a traveller,
a term used by Shakespeare in "Measure for Measure" (iv. 3), "Master
Forthright the tilter, and brave Master Shoe-tie, the great traveller."

_A Solemn Supper._ In Shakespeare's day this was a phrase for a feast or
banquet given on any important occasion, such as a birth, marriage, etc.
Macbeth says (iii. 1):

"To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir,
And I'll request your presence."

Howel, in a letter to Sir T. Hawke, 1636, says: "I was invited
yesternight to a _solemne supper_ by B. J. [Ben Jonson], where you were
deeply remembered."

So, in "Romeo and Juliet" (i. 5), Tybalt says:

"What! dares the slave
Come hither, cover'd with an antic face,
To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?"

And in "All's Well that Ends Well" (ii. 3), the King, on the conclusion
of the contract between Helena and Bertram, says:

"The solemn feast
Shall more