of

poetic of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely to assert it in the ing scene of Henry V, but as we read the three plays in which enry plays so prominent a part, we realize that the change is less sudden and less complete than the chroniclers represent. From the Prince's soliloquy at the end of 1 Henry IV, Act i, scene 2, we see that he is very far from being the slave of riotous pleasure, and that revelry is for him only a pastime with which he will dispense when the hour for strenuous action arrives. In his interview with his father in iii. 2, and in his conduct at the battle of Shrewsbury, we discover that the promise made by him in his soliloquy is fulfilled to the letter. The Prince's detractors have seen in this soliloquy, and in the pledges that the Prince makes to his father, a strain of self-consciousness and arrogance. Yet what seems like arrogance is in reality nothing more than that self-knowledge which the Greeks made the highest of all knowledge, and which is assuredly a politic virtue. Self-knowledge meant for him also self-control, and we are made conscious of this latent power of selfcontrol amid the Prince's most riotous scenes. His temporary indulgence in tavern revelry, while it comes as a welcome relief after the strained formality of the court, serves also a diplomatic purpose: "And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I'll so offend to make offence a skill;

Redeeming time when men think least I will."

As we read these words of the Prince, we realize that he was not Bolingbroke's son for nothing; there is diplomacy even in his moments of revelry. His association with ostlers and drawers serves yet another purpose. His desire is to gain a fuller knowledge of men in every rank of life, and through fullness of knowledge to win broader sympathies and deeper insight into the duties of one who will one day be king, not only of nobles and prelates, but of tapsters and serving-men as well.

When we look discerningly into the Prince's character we realize that he unites in himself the highest qualities of men so divergent from each other as Henry IV and Hotspur. He has the diplomacy of Bolingbroke, but he tempers it with the martial prowess and chivalry of the great Percy. The latter is no match for him ia soldiership, and on the field of Shrewsbury he is forced to "render every glory up" to the man whom he has so persistently derided.

He has, too, the finer graces of the chivalrous nature generosity and reverence. He has only praise for Hotspur, alive or dead, while the prowess of his brother, John of Lancaster, wins from him the highest tribute of respect:

"Before, I loved thee as a brother, John;

But now, I do respect thee as my soul."

When the King, in return for his high deserts, gives him the life of Douglas, he graciously bestows the favor upon his younger brother, and contrives that Douglas's ransomless freedom shall come to him as a gift from Prince John. His reverence is seen in his bearing toward his father. In his interview with the King (iii. 2) he receives cruel insult. He is accused of "vassal fear' and "base inclination," and is represented as a traitor who is only too likely to side with the Percies against his own father. His reply to this wanton charge is full of a forbearance that springs from deep filial reverence:

"Do not think so; you shall not find it so:

And God forgive them that so much have sway'd
Your majesty's good thoughts away from me."

We recognize in the Prince a master-spirit. He possesses the highest qualities of kingliness, and holds those qualities in gracious equipoise. There is no littleness in him, and no excess; Shake-L speare has granted to him what he withheld from the heroes of his tragedies a well-balanced nature.

The remaining characters, with the exception of Falstaff, must be treated more summarily. The timorous Northumberland, who presents such a contrast to his audacious son, and who, "crafty-` sick," leaves that son to fight without him at Shrewsbury, is a contemptible figure. No less contemptible is Hotspur's uncle, Worcester. A schemer by nature, he is the real author of the conspiracy. His refusal to communicate to his nephew the King's generous offer of pardon on the eve of the battle of Shrewsbury, prompted as that refusal is by cowardly motives, makes us regard the death-sentence passed upon him by Henry IV as a just recompense for his treachery.

At the time when Shakespeare was writing Henry IV and Henry V, it would seem as though the Welsh nature were in some degree claiming his attention. In 1 Henry IV he has given us Glendower, in Henry V, Fluellen; and in both characters we trace certain

national traits upon which the individual features are superimposed. Owen Glendower occupies a somewhat heroic position in Welsh history, and Shakespeare, though he subjects the Welshman to a distinctly humorous treatment, is aware of his fine proportions. Mortimer declares him to be

"valiant as a lion,

And wondrous affable, and as bountiful
As mines of India."

Glendower does not, like Fluellen, speak with a Welsh accent, but he betrays his nationality in other and deeper ways. Holinshed tells us that in his youth, spent at the English court, he had studied law; Shakespeare says nothing of this, but endows him with a racial love for music, which accords with his romantic temperament much better than jurisprudence:

"I framed to the harp

Many an English ditty lovely well,

And gave the tongue a helpful ornament."

Racial, too, is his superstition, which in his case is also made to pamper to a childish egoism. In this Shakespeare was building upon the foundations of Holinshed, who invests Glendower with an atmosphere of necromancy, and tells of the strange wonders that attended him on his campaigns. Glendower ostentatiously regards himself as a man set apart for high purposes; "1 am not in the roll of common men" is his vain contention, and he persists in asserting his supernatural powers in spite of the wholesome ridicule of Hotspur.

The fascination exercised over us by Hotspur or Prince Henry is quite different from that exercised by Falstaff and it is also leas potent. We may apply to him the words that he whimsically applies to Poins:

"I am bewitched with the rogue's company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged; it could not be else; I have drunk medicines."

It is witchery that holds us fast in its toils, that deadens for the time our moral judgment, and makes us in love with knavery when that knavery is so full of mirth. Charles Lamb's ingenious claim for the characters of the later Restoration Comedy, that they be long to a world of their own which lies outside the world of Christer

dom and everyday life, appeals to us with added force in contemplating the character of Falstaff. When we soberly analyze his nature from the ethical standpoint, we are forced to confess that he is a liar, a profligate, and a cheat; but when we are actually reading and entering into the spirit of the Falstaff scenes, we stubbornly refuse to apply this moral analysis, and give ourselves up to the pure enjoyment of a humor that is as radiant as sunshine, and of wit that, for all its keenness, leaves no sting behind.

Falstaff is, beyond all contention, the most humorous creation in the whole field of literature. Attempts have been made to point to certain elements in the formation of his character which had taken literary shape before Shakespeare's time. Comparisons have been drawn between Falstaff and the miles gloriosus and the scurra of early Latin comedy, and between Falstaff and Rabelais' Panurge; but when the most is made of such points of resemblance, we must allow that the hereditary influence of literary ancestors nowhere counts for less than in the case of the man who is "Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe."

The taproot of humor runs very far beneath the surface of life, and draws, its sustenance from the hidden springs of human sympathy. At the same time humor can exist only by recognizing and utilizing the incongruities that go to the formation of character, and incongruity is the body of the humor of Falstaff. Maurice Morgann, the special pleader on behalf of Falstaff against the many charges of cowardice brought against him, rightly summed up the incongruous elements in Falstaff's character in his Essay on the Character of Falstaff, written more than a century ago. Falstaff is, wrote Morgann, "a man at once young and old, enterprising and fat, a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly in appearance and brave in reality; a knave without malice, a liar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman, and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honor. Incongruity is ever fertile in surprises, and as we follow the career of Falstaff through the play, we find him creating for us incidents as delightful as they are unforeseen. How humorously incongruous are the exclamations of this graybeard of seventy summers when robbing the travelers in Act ii, scene 2: "They hate us youth. What, ye knaves, young men must live!" How rich in surprises is his behavior on the battlefield of Shrewsbury! But perhaps the most incongruous element in his nature is his wit, the nimbleness of which accords so ill with that tun of flesh which

requires levers to lift it from the ground. Wit and humor, as Coleridge has taught us, are different things, and we must allow that some of the most humorous characters in literature Don Quixote for instance- are seldom consciously witty. But in Falstaff humor and wit meet and mingle; his humor makes his words more witty, and his wit exhibits new facets of his infinitely humorous and versatile character. Moreover, as he himself declares in Part II, he is not only witty himself, “but a cause that wit is in other men. Like the fool in As You Like It, he is a touchstone by which the wit and humor in other men are tested. Only those who, like Prince John of Lancaster, have no laughter in them fail to respond to Falstaff's gayety, and insist on regarding him seriously.

Coming back to what has already been stated, we repeat that in 1 Henry IV Falstaff must not be judged ethically, but enjoyed intellectually. We must regard him as the Prince of Wales regarded him when he sought in his companionship a healthful distraction from the cares and intrigues of real life. There will come, it is true, a time of rude awakening, when the newly crowned king will find escape from the duties of office no longer possible, but in 1 Henry IV the rejection of Falstaff

"I know thee not, old man fall to thy prayers"

is still far distant, and we are free to enjoy the boon fellowship of his company, taking no thought for the morrow. Falstaff creates for himself an atmosphere of humorous make-believe, through which the serious concerns of life and questions of morals cannot penetrate. Neither his cowardice nor his lying is to be taken seriously. As Professor Bradley has shown, his lies are told without any serious attempt to deceive. When he makes two men in buckram into eleven, and when he pretends to the Prince that he has slain Hotspur, deception is out of the question. He resorts to these devices out of an irresistible delight in egregious make-believe, and in order to place himself in a situation the escape from which will bring into play the inexhaustible resources of his wit. It is the same delight in make-believe that inspires his sudden and unenduring moods of piety, and that gives zest to such exclamations as "A plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder" "Company, villanous company, hath been the spoil of me.'

or,

If there is any serious purpose in life for Falstaff, it is to amuse the Prince and to provide him with mirthful entertainment. To achieve this purpose, he is prepared to go to any length, and only once, when he hands the Prince a bottle of sack instead of a pist