His companions had at least the sense to know Falstaff to be irresistible. In the scene where Prince Henry and Poins are disguised like drawers and wait upon Falstaff at Dame Quickly's, Poins urges the Prince to press it home upon the knight: "My lord, he will drive you out of your revenge, and turn all to a merriment if you take not the heat." The Prince remembered this advice later on, when having come into his own, and taken it upon himself, very properly no doubt, to dismiss Falstaff from his presence, he somewhat unluckily found himself once more referring to his old companion's girth : "Know, the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men." Then hastily adds, for he saw a twinkle in the old man's eye and knew himself undone were Falstaff but allowed to speak : "Reply not to me with a fool-born jest!" Heavens, what would one not give for the jest that then trembled on Falstaff's tongue! The Chief Justice was a learned man, well deserving his high place, but we should scan his best considered judgments in vain for traces of that admirable style which was bred in him by contact with Falstaff. The speech beginning "Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth that are written down old with all characters of Age?" is good proof how in another sense than Falstaff used the words "he was the cause that wit is in other men." There is nothing homely about Falstaff's wit, ready as lightning though it always was. The language which conveys it is perfect of its kind. Even in abuse, his choice of epithets is far above the Prince's. His eloquence is beyond all comparison, his satire biting, whilst his happiness of composition, his trick of language, is sweeter than the honey of Hybla. By the side of Falstaff's intelligence and felicity of expression, the other characters, great as some of them are, show small. Hotspur handles Glendower well enough, but what "hardiment" would not Falstaff have exchanged with the Welshman could he but have met him face to face! As it is, we have a description: "And he of Wales, that gave Amaimon the bastinado, and made Lucifer cuckold, and swore the devil his true liegeman upon the cross of a Welsh hook - what a plague call you him? Poins. O, Glendower." Sir John is only once introduced to us as being both in good company and of it. He is with the King, the Prince of Wales, John of Lancaster, the Earl of Westmoreland, and Sir Walter Blunt. He comports himself well, and when Lord Worcester enters and protests to the King that he had not sought rebellion, and the King retorts: "You have not sought it! how comes it then?" Sir John sarcastically observes :— "Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.” 1 The remark reminds one a little of the glorious Bastard, who stands for England in the play of “ King John." 66 What a critic he was of men we may judge from the great speech in which he declares he can see the bottom of Justice Shallow. How would Carlyle have got through life or written "Sartor Resartus" without the lines so often at the end of his pen: "When he was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.” At times there is a certain melancholy about Falstaff's utterances which is perhaps his only sign of grace. It is elusive, and escapes quotation marks, but it is there. He is no mere fat knight, wine-stained, with nothing in his pocket but "tavern reckonings, memorandums of bawdy houses, and one poor pennyworth of sugar-candy" to make him long-winded. He is the wittiest man that ever lived! A. BIRRELL. |