Various - Notes and Queries, Number 04, November 24, 1849

" King Henry IV., Part Second , act iv. sc. iv.

"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

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Conversion de la Reina de Suecia in Roma (1656).