Overquick

And Merlin answered, 'Overquick art thou / To catch a loathly plume fallen from the wing / Of that foul bird of rapine whose whole prey / Is man's good name: he never wronged his bride.

Then I slipped away and paid marked and honorific courtesy to Bederhof's wife and Bederhof's daughters, tall girls, not over-quick to be married, somehow quite inevitable if one considered Bederhof himself.

It is really, as Johnson himself saw, an elliptical expression, and was due to an overquick wit, the sire of many an Irish bull.