Sir John Falstaff by his extraordinary powers of persuasion not only induces Mrs Quickly to withdraw her Action but also to lend him more money !!! _ Henry 4 pt 2 nd Scene 2

FINAL EULOGY OF GASCOIGNE.

105 have so scrupulously adhered to throughout this trying inquiry, and offer no opinion whatever on the subject.

Mind, there is one thing I cannot, and will not, and do not intend to, allow anybody else to believe. I will not have it supposed, for a moment even, that Sir William Gascoigne could have been interested in the issue of this action on any grounds so contemptible as pecuniary commission in the event of recovery. Emphatically-No! If personal feeling had anything to do with his interference, it must have been a feeling far nobler than that of mere avarice-to wit, revenge! He had been baffled, discomfited, eclipsed by Falstaff, and he was human. That he may have wished to blight the prospects of Falstaff, is, alas! for our fallen nature, but too possible! But I cannot believe that he would even have accepted so much as a clerk's fee from Mrs. Quickly, -in spite of the notorious corruptibility of judges in the Middle Ages, and the absence of any proof of such greatness of character in the subject of these remarks as should have placed him above the besetting weaknesses of his race and order.

And now I trust I have performed the difficult task I proposed to myself of doing the fullest justice to Sir William Gascoigne's character. More; I flatter myself that when mere barren justice has failed to reestablish the memory of that great man in a sufficiently favourable light, I have at times even soared into chivalry. As his champion defender I have fearlessly grappled with all the accusations that could be brought against him in connection with this critical portion of his career. If I have failed in refuting them, the fault is mine.

It may be asked why I have taken all these pains in clearing up the character of a man who forms but a passing accessory to my main subject? In the first place, reader, let justice be done though the heavens fall. In the second place, if I had not satisfactorily proved-(for I have proved it, have I not?) Sir William Gascoigne's innocence of those charges, of which he might otherwise have been believed guilty, there are certain matters connected with the close of my hero's public career which it would have been impossible for me to explain away, except on grounds which I will here say nothing about, and which I hope it will not be my painful duty to allude to on a future occasion.

III.

SIR JOHN FALSTAFF AN AUTHOR.—FRAGMENTS OF HIS CORRESPONDENCE. EPISODE OF THE FAIR DOROTHEA AND ANCIENT PISTOL.

LET us turn awhile from the sickening horrors of war, and the scarcely less revolting machinations of statecraft, faction, and personal rivalry, to contemplate Sir John Falstaff under the soothing influences of the arts and the affections.

With the valour and generalship of Hundwulf Falstaff, the necessities of Roger, the thirst of Hengist, the humour and, alas! the ill-luck of Uffa,—our hero inherited the literary tastes of his celebrated ancestor, Peter. A deficiency in that poet's praiseworthy attribute of industry may have been one reason for his not having enriched the literature of his country by any legacy of first-class importance. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that the principle of encouraging authors to composition by adequate pecuniary rewards - defectively understood even in the present day—was, at that time, not even recognised; and the bare idea of aimless labour to a logical intellect like that of Sir John Falstaff would be naturally revolting.

Nevertheless, high rank may be claimed for Sir John as a British author - not so much from his actual achievements in the field of letters, as from the fact of his having been one of the earliest pioneers in the cause. Viewed by this light, he is entitled to classification in the same category with Chaucer, Lydgate, and others. He lacks the learning and polish of the firstmentioned writer, and is deficient in the patient observation of the second; while both surpass him in fecundity. On the other hand, he is vastly superior to the Monk of Bury in richness of imagination and daring boldness of invention; while the charges of gross plagiarism and corruption of the English language by the adoption of foreign idiom, from which the fondest partiality has been unable to clear the memory of the author of the Canterbury Pilgrimage, have never been brought against Sir John Falstaff, that I am aware of.

The Falstaff papers-such fragments of the author's composition as have been saved from the wreck of ages (of which a perfect Spanish Armada has gone down, under the heavy fire of Rear-Admiral Time, since Sir John Falstaff trod the deck of earthly existence) — are not voluminous. Cause has been already shown to suppose that they could never, in any case, have

FALSTAFF AS AN AUTHOR.

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attained to any considerable bulk. But on this head we have no accurate means of deciding. It has already been seen that Sir John Falstaff had powerful enemies. It would be to the interest of such people to destroy, or cause to be destroyed, any relics of our knight's greatness that might lead to the perpetuation of his glories and their own infamy. But I am getting upon dangerous ground again.

The favourite form of composition adopted by Sir John Falstaff was the epistolary; and he may be confidently set forth as the first English writer who brought that delightful branch of literature to anything like perfection. I would not have it supposed that Sir John was a mere idle gossip, like Horace Walpole, Cowper, and such latter-day dilettanti. He was essentially a practical man-literature was with him a means, not an end. His pen to him was like his sword—a weapon only to be used upon pressing occasion; but which, once assumed, was seldom laid aside till it had done good service. When he wrote, it was with the view to remedy some glaring want of the age he lived in. Being essentially the man of his age, he always knew, from the unerring test of his own necessities, what the age wanted, and wrote for it accordingly. There were no journals or magazines in those days. When our knight felt that any crying hardship or calamity inflicted upon suffering humanity typified in the personality of Sir John Falstaff-might be removed by the exercise of a little eloquence, persuasion, or even casuistry, he had no alternative but to address his arguments, prayers, or remonstrances, to private individuals. And trust me, Sir John Falstaff was not the man to write letters for nothing.

The earliest specimen of Sir John Falstaff's correspondence extant (and of any such, I can fearlessly assert, there exists not one in a single antiquarian collection in Europe which the diligent researches of myself and emissaries have failed to discover) is a little schoolboy letter written in a villanous, sprawling attempt at the Gothic character, scarcely legible, owing to the ravages of time and the defective education of a lad of fourteen, at a period when English had barely begun to be a written language. How boys learnt to write at all under a caligraphic régime which made it almost as difficult to pen a syllable as to design a cathedral, is to me a marvel, only explained by the unwelcome theory that our ancestors were much cleverer and more persevering fellows than ourselves. However, that young Jack Falstaff, soon after he found himself put in the way of making his fortune, as a reward for stealing poor Sir Simon Ballard's venison (mythical foreshadow of its owner's doom, whom we have seen so cruelly hung and roasted!), was able to build up his groined "m's," "v's," and "n's," to erect the transepts on his "t's," and ornament the façades of his capitals generally, so as to leave them intelligible at