bosom of thine. Charge an honest woman with picking thy pocket! Why, thou impudent, emboss'd rascal, if there were any thing in thy pocket but tavern-reckonings, and one poor pennyworth of sugar-candy to make thee long-winded; if thy pocket were enriched with any other injuries but these, I am a villain. And yet you will stand to it; you will not pocket up wrong: art thou not ashamed!

Fals. Dost thou hear Hal? Thou know'st, in the state of innocency Adam fell and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty.

In all these replies there is clearly nothing more to be said. And thus, throughout, no exigency turns up but that Sir John is ready with a word that exactly fits into and fills the place. And his tactics lie not in turning upon his pursuers and holding them at bay; but, when the time is ripe, and they seem to have caught him, he instantaneously diverts them upon another scent, or else enchants them into a pause by his nimble-footed sallies and escapes.

Elsewhere the same faculty shows itself in a quick turning of events to his own advantage; as at the battle of Shrewsbury, when, being assailed by Douglas, he falls down as if killed, and in that condition witnesses the fall of Hotspur; and then claps up a scheme for appropriating the honour of his death. The stratagem must be given in his own words:

'Sblood! 'twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me scot and lot too. Counterfeit! I lie; I am no counterfeit: to die, is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.— Zwounds! I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead. How, if he should counterfeit too, and rise? By my faith, I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit. Therefore I'll make him sure; yea, and I'll swear I killed him. Why may not he rise as well as I? Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me. Therefore, sirrah, with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me,

He then shoulders the body and walks off. Presently he meets the Prince and his brother John, throws down the body, and we have the following:

Fals. There is Percy! if your father will do me any honour, so; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself. I look to be either earl or duke, I can assure you.

Prince. Why, Percy I killed, myself, and saw thee dead.

Fals. Didst thou! Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down and out of breath, and so was he; but we rose both at an instant, and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. If I may be believed, so; if not, let them that should reward valour bear the sin upon their own heads. I'll take it upon my death, I gave him this wound in the thigh: if the man were alive, and would deny it, zwounds! I would make him eat a piece of my sword.

Here his action as exactly fits into and fills the place as his words do in other cases. He carries the point, not by disputing the Prince's claim, but by making it appear that they both beat down the valiant Hotspur in succession. If the Prince left Hotspur dead, he saw Falstaff dead too. And Falstaff most adroitly clinches his scheme by giving this mistake such a turn as to accredit his own lies.

It has been said that Shakespeare displays no great force of invention; and that in the incidents of his dramas he borrows much more than he originates. It is true, he discovers no pride nor prodigality of inventiveness; he shows indeed a noble indifference on that score; cares not to get up new plots and incidents of his own where he finds them ready-made to his hand. Which is to me, as I have elsewhere remarked, good evidence that he prized novelty in such things at its true worth, and chose to spend his force on the weightier matters of his art. But he is inventive enough whenever he has occasion to be so; and in these incidents about Falstaff, as in hundreds of others, he shows

a fertility and aptness of invention in due measure and keeping with his other gifts.

Falstaff finds special matter of self-exultation in that the tranquil, easy contact and grapple of his mind acts as a potent stimulus on others, provided they be capable of it, lifting them up to his own height. "Men of all sorts," says he, "take a pride to gird at me. The brain of this foolishcompounded clay, man, is not able to invent any thing that tends to laughter, more than I invent, or is invented on me; I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men." Here it is plain that he is himself proud of the pride that others take in girding at him; he enjoys their wit even more than they do, because he is the begetter of it. He is the flint, to draw sparks from their steel, and himself shines by the light he causes them to emit. For, in truth, to laugh and to provoke laughter is with him the chief end of man. Which is further shown in what he says of Prince John: "Good faith, this same young, sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh." He sees that the brain of this dry youth has nothing for him to get hold of or work upon; that, be he ever so witty in himself, he cannot be the cause of any wit in him; and he is vexed and chagrined that his wit fails upon him. And Johnson, speaking of Prince John's frosty-hearted virtue, well remarks that "he who cannot be softened into gayety cannot easily be melted into kindness." And, let me add, none are so hopeless as they that have no bowels. Austere boys are not apt to make large-souled men. And it was this same strait-laced youth who, in the history as in the play, afterwards broke faith with the Archbishop and other insurgent leaders near York, snapping them up with a mean and cruel act of perfidy, and, which is more, thought the better of him

self for having done so. I suspect Prince Henry is nearer Heaven in his mirth than Prince John in his prayers!

This power of generating wit and thought in others is what, in default of entertainment for his nobler qualities, attracts the Prince; who evidently takes to Sir John chiefly for the mental excitement of his conversation. And, on the other hand, Falstaff's pride of wit is specially gratified in the fascination he has over the Prince; and he spares no pains, scruples no knavery, to work diversion for him. Witness what he says to himself when tempering Justice Shallow between his finger and his thumb": "I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing-out of six fashions. O, it is much that a lie with a slight oath, and a jest with a sad brow, will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders. O, you shall see him laugh, till his face be like a wet cloak ill laid up."

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Nor has Falstaff any difficulty in stirring up congenial motions in the Prince, insomuch that the teacher sometimes has enough to do to keep his leading. Falstaff is the same in this respect when the Prince is away; indeed his wit is never more fluent and racy than in his soliloquies. But it is not so with the Prince; as appears in his occasional playing with other characters, where he is indeed sprightly and sensible enough, but wants the nimbleness and raciness of wit which he displays in conversation with Sir John. The cause of which plainly is, that Falstaff has his wit in himself; the Prince, in virtue of Falstaff's presence. With Sir John the Prince is nearly as great as he in the same kind; without him, he has none of his greatness; though he has a greatness of his own which is far better, and which Falstaff is so far from having in himself, that he cannot even

perceive it in another. Accordingly it is remarkable that Prince Henry is the only person in the play who understands Falstaff, and the only one too whom Falstaff does not understand.

One of Sir John's greatest triumphs is in his first scene with the Chief Justice; the purpose of that scene being, apparently, to justify the Prince in yielding to his fascinations, by showing that there is no gravity so firm but he can thaw it into mirth, provided it be the gravity of a fertile and genial mind. And so, here, the sternness with which this wise and upright man begins is charmed into playfulness before he gets through. He slides insensibly into the style of Sir John, till at last he falls to downright punning. He even seems to draw out the interview, that he may taste the delectable spicery of Falstaff's talk; and we fancy him laughing repeatedly in his sleeve while they are talking, and then roaring himself into stitches directly he gets out of sight. Nor, unless our inward parts be sadly out of gear, can we help loving and honouring him the more for being drawn into such an intellectual frolic by such an intellectual player.

Falstaff's Humour.

Coleridge denies that Falstaff has, properly speaking, any humour. Coleridge is high authority indeed; nevertheless I cannot so come at Sir John but that his whole mental structure seems pervaded with a most grateful and refreshing moisture; nor can I well understand any definition of humour that would exclude him from being among the greatest of all both verbal and practical humourists. Just think of his proposing Bardolph,-an offscouring and package of dregs which he has picked up, nobody can guess