Mass! thou sayest true; the prince once set a dish of Apple-johns before him, and told him there were five more Sir Johns; and putting off his hat, said, I will now take my leave of these six dry, round, old, withered knights.
Nay, you shall see my orchard, where, in an arbour, we will eat a last year's Pippin of my own graffing, with a dish of Caraways, and so forth.
I pray you be gone; I will make an end of my dinner. There's Pippins and cheese to come.
_Merry Wives of Windsor_, act i, sc. 2 (11).
The deer was, as you know, _sanguis_, in blood; ripe as the Pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of _cœlo_--the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a Crab on the face of _terra_--the soil, the land, the earth.
_Love's Labour's Lost_, act iv, sc. 2 (3).
Thy wit is a very Bitter Sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.
And is it not well served in to a sweet goose?
What's this? A sleeve? 'Tis like a demi-cannon. What! up and down, carved like an Apple-tart?
_Taming of the Shrew_, act iv, sc. 3 (88).
How like Eve's Apple doth thy beauty grow, If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!
Here Shakespeare names the Apple, the Crab, the Pippin, the Pomewater, the Apple-john, the Codling, the Caraway, the Leathercoat, and the Bitter-Sweeting. Of the Apple generally I need say nothing, except to notice that the name was not originally confined to the fruit now so called, but was a generic name applied to any fruit, as we still speak of the Love-apple, the Pine-apple,[20:1] &c. The Anglo-Saxon name for the Blackberry was the Bramble-apple; and Sir John Mandeville, in describing the Cedars of Lebanon, says: "And upon the hills growen Trees of Cedre, that ben fulle hye, and they beren longe Apples, and als grete as a man's heved"[20:2] (cap. ix.). In the English Bible it is the same. The Apple is mentioned in a few places, but it is almost certain that it never means the Pyrus malus, but is either the Orange, Citron, or Quince, or is a general name for a tree fruit. So that when Shakespeare (24) and the other old writers speak of Eve's Apple, they do not necessarily assert that the fruit of the temptation was our Apple, but simply that it was some fruit that grew in Eden. The Apple (_pomum_) has left its mark in the language in the word "pomatum," which, originally an ointment made of Apples, is now an ointment in which Apples have no part.