his relations with others, and his sensual philosophy-witness his inimitable soliloquies on honour, on the influence of wine upon bravery, and his description of the beggarly vaga

bonds whom he had enlisted."

Perhaps the cowardice of Falstaff is too much insisted on, both by the English and the German critic. In Falstaff, cowardice is not so much a weakness as a principle,-less an innate quality than the dictate of wisdom and reflection. He has the sense of danger, but not the discomposure of fear. He retains his sagacity, quick-wittedness, and presence of mind-and invariably contrives to extricate himself from his dangers or embarrassments. With such a body as he is obliged to drag about him, what could courage avail him? He sees that military prowess would, on his part, be a ridiculous and hopeless affectation; the better part of valour, whatever it may be in other cases, he most potently believes in his own case must be discretion. Falstaff's cowardice is only proportionate to the danger, and so would every wise man's be, did not other feelings make him valiant. To such feelings-the dread of disgrace, the sense of honour, and the love of fame, he makes no pretension. It is the very characteristic of his nature to be totally insensible to them. He looks only to self preservation, and that he finds can be much more effectually secured by wit than weapons.

On the wit of Falstaff we find little in our German friends that is new or deserves quotation. We prefer extracting the following pleasing and discriminating passage from one of the essays of Mackenzie.* "The imagination of Falstaff is wonderfully quick and creative, in the pictures of humour and the associations of wit. But the pregnancy of his wit,' according to his own phrase, is made a tapster;' and his fancy, how vivid soever, still subjects itself to the grossness of those sensual conceptions which are familiar to his mind. We are astonished at that art by which Shakspeare leads the powers of genius, imagination, and wisdom in captivity to this son of earth; it is as if, transported into the enchanted island in the Tempest,

we saw the rebellion of Caliban successful, and the airy spirits of Prospero ministering to the brutality of his slave.

Hence, perhaps, may be derived great part of that infinite amusement which succeeding audiences have always found from the representation of Falstaff. We have not only the enjoyment of those combinations and that contrast to which philosophers have ascribed the pleasure we derive from wit in general; but we have that singular combination and contrast which the gross, the sensual, and the brutish mind of Falstaff exhibits, when joined and compared with that admirable power of invention, of wit, and of humour, which his conversation perpetually displays.

"In the immortal work of Cervantes, we find a character with a remarkable mixture of wisdom, and absurdity, which in one page excites our highest ridicule, and in the next is entitled to our highest respect. Don Quixote, like Falstaff, is endowed with excellent discernment, sagacity, and genius; but his good sense holds fief of his diseased imagination, of his overruling madness for the achievements of knight-errantry, for heroic valour, and heroic love. The ridicule in the character of Don Quixote consists in raising low and vulgar incidents, through the medium of his disordered fancy, to a rank of importance, dignity, and solemnity, to which in their nature they are the most opposite that can be imagined. With Falstaff it is nearly the reverse; the ridicule is produced by subjecting wisdom, honour, and other the most grave and dignified principles, to the control of grossness, buffoonery, and folly. It is like the pastime of a family masquerade, where the laughter is equally excited by dressing clowns as gentlemen, or gentlemen as clowns.'

Almost all critics have concurred in condemning the needless barshness of Falstaff's treatment by the new king. Falstaff, agreeably surprised by the intelligence of the death of Henry IV., while engaged in a most serious carousal at Justice Shallow's, posts up to London, in the full persuasion of the truth of Pistol's assu

rance. "Sweet Kuight, thou art now one of the greatest men in the realm." He has even begun to lavish dignities upon his friends on the strength of his own immediate promotion; and to threaten his enemies with his vengeance. "Master Robert Shallow, choose what office thou wilt in the land - 'Tis thine."-"Let us take any man's horses, the laws of England are at our commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends,-and woe to my Lord Chief Justice!" Such is the magic which the wit and bonhommie of Falstaff exercise over our minds, that we feel it like a personal stroke of injustice and cruelty, when in return for the enthusiastic and hearty, "God save thee, my sweet boy," with which he greets his old associate in the coronation procession, he receives the freezing answer,-not even addressed to himself," My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man." And this at last is followed by a sermon on his vices, and a sentence of banishment for ten miles from the royal person. At first he cannot believe his misfortune real; "'tis but a colour." "I shall be sent for in private to him;" he endeavours, though obviously with some sinkings of heart, to persuade Shallow that his thousand pounds are safe: till the entrance of the Chief Justice, and his committal to the Fleet Prison-a committal for which there is no warrant in the speech of the King-banish the last remains of his delusion. It is singular, that Shakspeare should have introduced this needless and unmeaning piece of cruelty; for the real conduct of Henry, as described by Stowe, would have afforded materials for a noble scene, in which justice might have been done to the cause of morality without any injury to feeling. "After his coronation, King Henry called unto him all those young lords and gentlemen who were the followers of his young acts, to every one of whom he gave rich gifts, and then commanded that as many as would change their manners, as he intended to do, should abide with him in his court; and to all that would persevere in their former like conversation, he gave express commandment, upon

pain of their heads, never after that day to come into his presence."

In the First Part of Henry IV. Falstaff is the Atlas upon whose shoulders the support of almost the whole comic portion of the plot is laid; for Bardolph is but the recipient and the butt of the wit of other men. He has no wit save in his "malmsey nose;" deprived of that feature, he would be less than nothing and vanity. Shakspeare himself, however, appears to have felt the demands on his humorous invention in the character of Falstaff to be too great and incessant; for, in the second part of the play, he divides the duties of the comic among several auxiliaries -Pistol, the Hostess, Shallow, and Silence-and the comic is more of the passive than the active kind. Pistol is a character of a more temporary and local cast than is usual with Shakspeare; a braggadocio, whose language is a patchwork of passages from plays in which the poet had been occasionally a performer. This language, originally adopted to aid his swaggering manner, has, in the end, become natural to him; he thinks, as well as he speaks, in fustian. It is in vain that Falstaff entreats him, when he brings the news of Henry's death, to "deliver them like a man of this world." The only answer he receives is,

"A foutra for the world and worldlings base! I speak of Africa, and golden joys." To many he appears, by dint of his "Ercles' vein," an absolute hero; but Falstaff, with his usual sagacity, has detected his thorough cowardice, has long set him down as "a tame cheater," and actually dares (!) to draw his sword upon the boaster,* and drive him out of the Boar's Head with contempt. The Hostess is a still more carefully finished character, and more interesting, because less connected with the mere man ners of the time. Hers is one of which the prototype can never entirely disappear. To her imagination, the knight whom she has known "these nine-and-twenty years, come peascod time," appears a very pattern of honour and a mirror of knighthood. It is evident she could never have mustered up courage to have him arrested, had her bill