Page "Mespilus germanica" Paragraph 14

In As You Like It, Rosalind makes a complicated pun involving grafting her interlocuter with the trees around her which bear love letters and with a medlar " I'll graff it with you, and then I shall graff it with a medlar.

Then it will be the earliest fruit i ' th ' country ; for you'll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that's the right virtue of the medlar.

" ( III. ii. 116-119 ).