In Mr. Dyce's _Remarks on Mr. J.P. Collier's and Mr. C. Knight's
Editions of Shakspeare_, pp. 115, 116, the following note occurs:--
"_King Henry IV., Part Second_, act iv. sc. iv.
"As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As _flaws_ congealed in the spring of day."
"Alluding," says Warburton, "to the opinion of some
philosophers, that the vapours being congealed in air by cold,
(which is most intense towards the morning,) and being
afterwards rarified and let loose by the warmth of the sun,
occasion those sudden and impetuous guests of wind which are
called flaws."--COLLIER.
"An interpretation altogether wrong, as the epithet here applied
to 'flaws' might alone determine; '_congealed_ gusts of wind'
being nowhere mentioned among the phenomena of nature except in
Baron Munchausen's _Travels_. Edwards rightly explained 'flaws,'
in the present passage, 'small blades of ice.' I have myself
heard the word used to signify both _thin cakes of ice_ and the
_bursting of those cakes_."--DYCE.
Mr. Dyce may perhaps have heard the world _floe_ (plural _floes_)
applied to _floating sheet-ice_, as it is to be found so applied
extensively in Captain Parry's _Journal of his Second Voyage_; but it
remains to be shown whether such a term existed in Shakspeare's time. I
think it did not, as after diligent search I have not met with it; and,
if it did, and then had the same meaning, _floating sheet-ice_, how
would it apply to the illustration of this passage?
That the uniform meaning of _flaws_ in the poet's time was _sudden gust
of wind_, and figuratively sudden gusts of passion, or fitful and
impetuous action, is evident from the following passages:--
"Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd
Wreck to the seamen, tempest to the field,
Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds,
_Gust_ and foul _flaws_ to herdsmen and to herds."
_Venus and Adonis._
"Like a great sea-mark standing every _flaw_."
_Coriolanus_, act v. sc. iii.
"--patch a wall to expel the winter's _flaw_."
_Hamlet_, act v. sc. i.
"Like to the glorious sun's transparent beams
Do calm the fury of this mad-bred _flaw_."
_3d Pt. Henry VI._, act iii. sc. i.
"--these _flaws_ and starts (impostors to true
fear)."
_Macbeth_, act iv. sc. iv.
"Falling in the _flaws_ of her own youth, hath
blistered her report."
_Meas. for Meas._, act ii. sc. iii.
So far for the poet's acceptation of its meaning.