another's heroism; so he now makes no
scruple of sacrificing the virtue, the honour, the happiness of others
to his own mean and selfish pleasure.

But this total subjection of the mental to the animal nature cannot
long proceed without betraying the succours of reason. When the bands
of morality are thus spurned, a man rapidly sins his understanding
into lameness; as its better forces must needs be quickly rotted in
such a vapour-bath of sensuality. In this way an overweening pride of
wit often results in causing a man to be deserted by his wits; this
too in matters where he feels surest of them and has most need of
them. In refusing to see what is right, he loses the power of seeing
what is prudent and safe. He who persists in such a course will
inevitably be drawn into signal lapses of judgment, however richly
nature may have endowed him with that faculty: he will stumble over
his own self-love; his very assurance will be tripping him when he
least expects it. And so Falstaff's conceit and egotism, working
together, as they do, with his greed and lust, have the effect of
stuffing him with the most childish gullibility, at once laying him
open to the arts of bamboozling, and inviting others to practise them
upon him. He has grown to look with contempt upon honesty as a cheap
and vulgar thing, and is well punished in that honest simplicity
easily outwits him: nay, more; his fancied skill in sensual intrigue
brings him to a pass where ignorance itself is a clean overmatch for
him, and fairly earns the privilege of flouting at him.

Falstaff is fair-spoken when he chooses to be, can talk with judgment
and good sense, and has at command the arts of a gentlemanly and
dignified bearing. The two Windsor wives, meeting him at a social
dinner, and seeing him in his best suit of language and manners, think
him honourable as well as pleasant, and are won to some notes of
respect and affability towards him: "he would not swear; praised
women's modesty; and gave such orderly and well-behaved reproof of all
uncomeliness," that they would have sworn his disposition was at one
with the truth of his words. And because they meet his fair deportment
with some gentle returns of politeness, therefore he, in his conceit
of wit, of rank, and of fame, thinks they are smitten with a passion
for him. Fancying that they are hotly in love with him, he resolves on
making love to them; not that he is at all touched with the passion,
but with the