"Poins. Look, look, here comes Bardolph.

Prince. And the boy that I gave Falstaff: he had him from me Christian; and see if the fat villain have not transformed him

Enter BARDOLPH and Page.

Bard. 'Save your grace.

Prince. And yours, most noble Bardolph.

ape.

Bard. [to the page]. Come, you pernicious ass, you bashful fool, must you be blushing? wherefore blush you now? What a maidenly man-at-arms are you become! Is it such a matter to get a pottle-pot's maidenhead ?

Page. He called me, even now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could discern no part of his face from the window: at last I spied his eyes, and methought he had made two holes in the alewife's new petticoat, and peeped through."

Here we have this unfortunate boy trying his 'prentice hand upon that well-worn jest in the infamous company he was now keeping, Bardolph's red face. He labours the thing just as a boy would, and is too obviously doing his best.

"Prince. Hath not the boy profited?

Bard. [to the page]. Away, you whoreson upright rabbit, away! Page. Away, you rascally Althea's dream, away!

Prince. Instruct us, boy; what dream, boy?

Page. Marry, my lord, Althea dreamed she was delivered of a fire-brand; and therefore I call him her dream.

Prince. A crown's worth of good interpretation. There it is, boy. [Gives him money.

Poins. Oh, that this good blossom could be kept from cankers! Well, there is sixpence to preserve thee.

Bard. If you do not make him be hanged among you, the gallows shall be wronged."

The boy was reserved for a better fate than Bardolph predicted: he was killed at Agincourt by some French runaways, "expressly against the law of arms"; but none the less it was a bad jest for him when the "mad Prince" gave him to Falstaff.

The question whether Sir John was a coward in grain or only in instinct is hardly worth debating, since the presence of physical courage in such a character as his would lend it nothing of attractiveness. The hacking of his sword after the Gadshill affair is a thing hard to disguise in humour, whilst the stabbing in the thigh of the dead Hotspur-"Therefore, sirrah [stabbing him], with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me [takes Hotspur on his back]"-is as blackguardly an action as was ever recorded in the annals of shame. His lieswe know what they were! "like the father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable." As for his speech who dare make a collection of his base comparisons, his unsavoury similes? No one but an eighteenthcentury commentator would ever think of seeking to unravel the hidden meanings and vile allusions of his vocabulary. Falstaff's "Kiss me, Doll," followed by his cry "I am old, I am old," together with other touches in the same scene, might well stand for the last words of disgust and horror. Then we call to mind his deathbed, crying out "God, God, God" three or four times, with Mistress Quickly by his side to give him ghostly comfort: "a' should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet." Other details are supplied us, but there is no need to mention

what no one can forget, - Shakespeare cannot be accused of handling Falstaff tenderly as if he loved him.

We are not a nation of moralists. Hypocrisy is our besetting sin. What, I wonder, would Pascal have had to say about Falstaff? He was severe with Montaigne : "Il est plien de mots sales et déshonnêtes." But we have no Pascals. Johnson, who is our great moralist, is but halfhearted in his censure, which reads like the language addressed by a judge who is himself a free-liver to an unlucky prisoner - something, that is, that has to be said. The good doctor is annoyed with the Chief Justice for sending Sir John to prison at the end of the First Part. He is quite disposed to sue out a Habeas Corpus. "I do not see why Falstaff is carried to the Fleet. We have never lost sight of him since his dismission from the King: he has committed no new fault and therefore incurred no punishment.' And in another place Johnson bids us remember that Falstaff's character is "stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth." On the whole, I am inclined to call this the "backing of your friends."

Foreign judgment is harsher, and Victor Hugo dubs Sir John centaure du porc, "Swine Centaur," and thereby for once exposed himself to meet the brunt of Mr. Swinburne's spear. Mr. Swinburne will not hear of so base a comparison, and seeks to pull Falstaff out of the sty, albeit the glorified sty, of a centaure du porc, by dwelling upon the words of Mistress Quickly in "King Henry V": "By my troth, he will yield the crow a pudding one of

these days-the King has killed his heart!" Here, exclaims Mr. Swinburne, with generous effusiveness, "here is the point in Falstaff so strangely overlooked by the man of all men who we should have said must be the first to seize and to appreciate it. It is as grievous as it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France - the most infinite in compassion, in conscience and tender heart' of all great poets and all nations of the world should have missed the deep tenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the greatest among his fellows." In a word or two, we are asked to believe that Falstaff so loved Prince Hal that when dismissed his presence, he died of a broken heart; and the wonder is Victor Hugo did not see it all plainly revealed in half a line of Dame Quickly's. Shakespeare uses the word "heart" more than sixty times in the two parts of " King Henry IV" and " King Henry V," and in many different senses. Well, I'll repent, and that suddenly," says Falstaff in the First Part, "while I am in some liking. I shall be out of heart shortly and then I shall have no strength to repent." In this context "heart" must mean breath, and in Dame Quickly's lips it probably meant courage or spirits. Valiant as is Mr. Swinburne's effort, I doubt whether it has convinced anybody. Falstaff was too intellectual a being, too supreme a wit, too lively an intelligence, to be so overdone with love for one, who beside him was but a raw boy, as to die of wounded affection. Whatever else "plump Jack was, he was not a

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nute study of the text of Shakespeare, as of course Shakespeare, though no party to our weakness, no participator in our moral obliquity, always meant it should. Love Falstaff we somehow must. In a sense and a very real sense his is a terrible character. That such a man should be "after the passion of a thousand years" so old and so profane is a thing not to be got over lightly, as Hazlitt would see us over it. Shakespeare did not mean his passages of horror to be struck out of the text. There those passages are, and there they must remain, "burning, burning."

But this sense is not the prevailing sense, or Falstaff would not be what he is to the English-speaking race, — a rich estate to be enjoyed by them and their heirs for ever. By the exercise, on the most prodigious scale, of sheer mother-wit and inventiveness, Shakespeare has bodily lifted this marvellous creature of his fancy, "this ton of a man," up and above the essential corruption of his character into an atmosphere of humour, clear and buoyant, the like of which was never experienced before, where every healthy being, unless he be one of those whom no man can make laugh, can breathe with freedom and joy. With such a gale of wind blowing from off the sea, who need think of drains or cesspools! Falstaff's wit carries all before it. It is no pothouse merriment no matter to amuse a Prince. It is the best wit in the world. This gives it a dignity which reacts upon Sir John himself. The Prince has a ready wit, but when he engages Falstaff in single combat, he cuts but a poor figure and goes limping off the field.