as they must have arisen and remained in the dramatist's mind, that this was after his banishment from the person of the prince, who says,

"For competence of life I will allow you,

That lack of means enforce you not to evil."

Prince John, also, says immediately afterwards :

"I like this fair proceeding of the king's:
He hath intent, his wonted followers
Shall all be very well provided for ;

But all are banish'd, till their conversations
Appear more wise and modest to the world."

Falstaff may then have been living at Windsor, with his former "followers," on an allowance from the young king: but that "ten pounds a week" was too great a rate for his purse, we learn from the necessity he is under of" discarding some of his followers." Falstaff was less of a soldier at Windsor than formerly, but Pistol and Nym keep up their martial dignity, and refuse to take "the humour letter." In the same play, it is remarkable that he is described as being so poor; and Ford "thinks himself in much better plight for a lender" than he is. He addresses his body, and says, "Wilt thou after the expence of so much money be now a gainer?" Could he allude to the money he borrowed from Justice Shallow; and had he been so extravagant as to be obliged to share the booty of the fan-handle with Pistol? In the Falstaff who says "Reason, you rogue, reason: Think'st thou I'll endanger my soul gratis ?" we recognize the Falstaff of the historical plays.

I think, with Skottowe, that "the want of symmetry

between the two characters is in the point of Falstaff's intrigue with the merry wives. The objection is not to his inclination to gallantry with Mistress Ford, or Mistress Page, but to the personal vanity and simple credulity which a belief of their attachment to him necessarily presupposes in Falstaff. Of personal vanity the fat knight of Henry IV. possesses not a spark: on the contrary, his preposterous fatness is an exhaustless theme of his own laughter. Rather than have courted exposure and ridicule from two sprightly women, he would instantly have smelt waggery in any advances they might have made to him; and if he had not at once put an end to their hopes of fooling him, he would merely have yielded till he could successfully have turned the tables on themselves. The Falstaff of the Merry Wives,' indeed, jests with himself, and is merry with his unwieldy person, but the effect is only that of making his conduct appear more absurd and unnatural."n

6

The differences which exist between the Falstaff of the Merry Wives and the Falstaff of the historical plays may be accounted for much more reasonably, on the tradition that Shakespeare was, in some measure, writing to the ideas of another, than on the unsupported conjecture that they were originally two distinct characters. It is scarcely probable that our great dramatist would draw two characters so nearly similar. That the conjecture does explain several difficulties, I admit; but I should rather be inclined to believe that the two parts of Henry IV., like the Merry Wives, originally

n Skottowe's "Life of Shakespeare," Svo. Lond. 1824, vol. ii.,

p. 38.

existed in an unfinished state, and that, when the first sketch of the Merry Wives was written, those plays had NOT been altered and amended in the form in which they have come down to us. This conjecture will, I think, be sufficient to explain nearly every difficulty; and, knowing so little as we do of the history of Shakespeare's composition, I do not see any thing very improbable in it. If Johnson had not published the sketch of the Merry Wives and there can be little doubt that it was a piratical publication-should we have had any reason to think that the amended play had ever existed in any other form than that in which it appeared in the first folio? At all events, this conjecture will obviously dispense with the necessity of believing in any "considerable abatement of the poet's skill."

It is a fact, admitted, I believe, by all modern critics, that the Falstaff of the two parts of Henry IV. was originally called Oldcastle. Besides the internal evidences in the two plays, we have direct intimation of the fact in early writers: and as I have collected these as far as I could, in a little work on the subject, recently published, it cannot be necessary to enter into the question here. Mr. Collier thinks it is now placed beyond a shadow of a doubt. The settlement of this is of some importance in its connexion with the present question, and whether Oldcastle was originally the name of the fat knight in the Merry Wives. Had it been so, it is somewhat strange that not any internal evidence should be left

• On the character of Sir John Falstaff, as originally exhibited by Shakespeare in the two parts of Henry IV., 12mo. Lond. 1841.

of the alteration of the name. In fact, the metre in one case, as I have shown, would not suit Oldcastle, and it could scarcely have been altered to Falstaff. We may, then, fairly conclude that the Merry Wives was written after the change had been made from Oldcastle to Falstaff, in all probability not very long after the production of the two parts of Henry IV.

66

The reader will thus see, that the supposition of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor" having been written before Henry V., and the second part of Henry IV., involves fewer inconsistencies than any other. It is true that, in the sketch where Falstaff hears the noise of hunters at Hearne's Oak, he exclaims, "I'll lay my life. the mad Prince of Wales is stealing his father's deer;" but, I think, with Mr. Knight, this may have reference to the Prince of the Famous Victories, a character with whom Shakespeare's audience was familiar. In the amended play, we find Page objecting to Fenton, because "he kept company with the wild Prince and Poins" (act iii., sc. 2.); but this refers to his past life, and, therefore, does not necessarily imply that Henry V. was yet a prince. We find that the character of Mistress Quickly only is inconsistent with the manner in which the other persons, common to the Merry Wives and the historical plays, are introduced. If the Merry Wives had preceded the two parts of Henry IV., Shakespeare would scarcely have alluded to Poins, and his intimacy with the Prince, neither of them being introduced into the former play.

It remains for me to notice the collection of early

tales printed in the AppendixP to the present volume, and which, it is supposed, may have furnished our great dramatist with some of the incidents he has employed in the "Merry Wives of Windsor." How far this may have been the case, can, of course, be matter for conjecture only; but, if Shakespeare had any of them in his recollection when he wrote the Merry Wives and it would appear, from a few similarities of language, that he had it is certain that he has completely changed their detail and application. He has adopted the same incidents, but his design in using them was totally different from that of the novelist. The reader will be better able to judge from a perusal of them, than from any analysis I could offer.

Before I conclude these brief introductory observations, there is one point I wish to introduce to the reader's notice, though I will not pretend to say how far I may be borne out in my opinion. It is a singular fact, that no allusion to the legend of Horne the hunter, as he is called in the following sketch, has ever been discovered in any other writer. other writer. We are entirely ignorant of the date of the legend. In a manuscript, however, of the time of Henry VIII., in the British Museum, I find "Rycharde Horne, yeoman," among "the names of the hunters whiche be examyned and have confessed" for hunting in his majesty's forests. Is it improbable to

P Oldys, in his manuscript notes to Langbaine, seems to mention the tale of "the caskets" in Boccaccio as the probable foundation of part of the plot of the "Merry Wives of Windsor," but, as I could not discover any similarity, I have not inserted it in the Appendix. 9 MS. Bib. Reg. 17 C. xvi.