f the world; how radiant
with animal spirits; how completely inexhaustible in cheerfulness; how
copious in comic invective; how incessantly nimble and ludicrous in wit
and in waggery; how strange a compound of mind and sensuality,
shrewdness and folly, fidelity and roguery, brazen mendacity, and comic
selfishness! They do not like to think of him as merely a fat old fool,
bamboozled by a pair of sprightly, not over-delicate women, far inferior
to him in mental calibre, and made a laughing-stock for Fenton and sweet
Anne Page, and the lads and lassies of Windsor, and the chattering Welsh
parson. "Have I lived," cried Falstaff, in the moment of his
discomfiture, "to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of
English?" He is a hard case, an inveterate sinner, as worthless as any
man well could be, in the eyes of decorum and respectability; but those
who know him well grow to be fond of him, even if they feel that they
ought to be ashamed of it, and they do not quite forgive the poet for
making him contemptible.

You can find many other figures that will make you laugh, but you can
find no other figure that makes you laugh with such good reason. It
seems incredible that Shakespeare, with his all-embracing mind and his
perfect instinct of art, should deliberately have chosen to lessen his
own masterpiece of humour. For Shakespeare rejoiced in Falstaff, even
while he respected and recorded the inexorable justice of the moral law
that decrees and eventually accomplishes his destruction. There is no
one of his characters whose history he has traced with such minute
elaboration. The conception is singularly ample. You may see Falstaff,
as Shallow saw him, when he was a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke
of Norfolk; you may see him all along the current of his mature years;
his highway robberies on Gadshill; his bragging narrative to Prince
Henry; his frolicsome, paternal, self-defensive lecture to the prince;
his serio-comic association with the ragamuffin recruits at Coventry;
his adroit escape from the sword of Hotspur; his mendacious
self-glorification over the body of Harry Percy; his mishaps as a
suitor to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; his wonderfully humorous interviews
with the Chief-Justice and with Prince John of Lancaster; his junketings
with Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, and his rebuff and
consternation at his first and last meeting with King Henry V.; and
finally you may see him, as Mrs. Quickly saw him, on