“Sneck up,” according to Mr. C. Knight, is explained thus:—­

    “A passage in Taylor, the Water Poet, would show that this
    means ‘hang yourself.’  A verse from his ‘Praise of Hempseed’
    is given in illustration.”

“Snick up,” according to Mr. Collier, is said to be “a term of contempt,” of which the precise meaning seems to have been lost.  Various illustrations are given, as see his Note; but all are wide of the meaning.

Turn to Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 2d edition, and there is this explanation:—­

“Sneck, that part of the iron fastening of a door which is
raised by moving the latch.  To sneck a door, is to latch
it.”

See also Burn’s Poems:  The Vision, Duan First, 7th verse, which is as follows:—­

“When dick! the string the snick did draw,—­
And jee! the door gaed to the wa’;
An’ by my ingle-lowe I saw,
Now bliezin’ bright,
A tight, outlandish Hizzie, braw,
Come full in sight.”

These quotations will clearly show that “sneck” or “snick” applies to a door; and that to sneck a door is to shut it.  I think, therefore, that Sir Toby meant to say in the following reply:—­

“We did keep time, Sir, in our catches.  Sneck up!”

That is, close up, shut up, or, as is said now, “bung up,”—­emphatically, “We kept true time;” and the probability is, that in saying this, Sir Toby would accompany the words with the action of pushing an imaginary door; or sneck up.

In the country parts of Lancashire, and indeed throughout the North of England, and it appears Scotland also, the term “sneck the door” is used indiscriminately with “shut the door” or “toin’t dur.”  And there can be little doubt but that this provincialism was known to Shakspeare, as his works are full of such; many of which have either been passed over by his commentators, or have been wrongly noted, as the one now under consideration.

Shakspeare was essentially a man of the people; his learning was from within, not from colleges or schools, but from the universe and himself.  He wrote the language of the people; that is, the common every-day language of his time:  and hence mere classical scholars have more than once mistaken him, and most egregiously misinterpreted him, as I propose to show in some future Notes.

R.R.

* * * * *

FOLK LORE.

Death-bed Superstition. (No. 20. p. 315.).—­The practice of opening doors and boxes when a person dies, is founded on the idea that the ministers of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door (which alone would serve the purpose), crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and