considerable portion as largesse to the insurgents. The purses were faithfully restored to their owners.

At Blackheath our travellers came up with the body of the insurgent camp, commanded by Jack's old master of fence, Wat Smith, who had assumed the name of Tyler. Here it was Jack's good fortune to rescue the Princess of Wales, the young king's mother, from the fury of the malcontents, whom their honest but mistaken leader was unable to control. Jack asserted himself as a man of Kent, and claimed immunity for the princess as a Kentish woman - for had she not been known in the heyday of her beauty as the Fair Maid of Kent? Was she not the widow of the Black Prince, who had humbled the pride of the haughty Frenchmen, to whom it was notorious that all such evils as taxes, game laws, bad harvests, and expensive beer, were attributable? The princess, he assured them, had just been on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to pray at the shrine of St. Thomas à Beckett for an extension of the peerage, by which every man of the age of twenty-one would be entitled to landed property and a seat at His Majesty's council. In conclusion, he would simply state, that, in order to prove her sisterly affection, the princess was anxious to kiss them all round proposition whereat the populace was highly amused, and to which the princess readily assented, only too glad to be let off so easily.

a

Thus did Jack Falstaff rescue the Princess of Wales from imminent danger, at no greater cost to her highness than a little sacrifice of personal dignity, and much subsequent expenditure of soap and water-all of which I have told briefly, seeing that the main incidents of the scene (doubtless taken down from the words of Falstaff himself) have been already chronicled by our old friend Maître Jean Froissart, curate of Lestines-and from his cheerful pages copied into the books of Hume and others.

For this good service to the royal family was John Falstaff knighted, on the same day which saw the like honour conferred upon one William Walworth, a fishmonger, for knocking out the misguided brains of poor Wat Smith- a much honester man than himself. Jack witnessed the perpetration of this murderous act of snobbishness, and took a deeply rooted dislike to Sir William Walworth ever afterwards.

Wat Tyler did not die unavenged. Sir John Falstaff dealt with Sir William Walworth for fish. When Walworth sent in his bill, he began to understand the meaning of Nemesis.

Bardolph greatly distinguished himself in the sacking of London by the Kentish rebels, several of whom he had the honour of bringing to justice on the pacification of society.

BOOK THE THIRD.

1410.

I.

FOR THE MOST PART A TREATISE ON HEROES AND KNIGHTS-ERRANT.

WHY should we call Time old, when we constantly find him playing tricks like a schoolboy? Here we have him at the beginning of the fifteenth century, amusing himself by rolling Sir John Falstaff down a hill, which men have agreed to call Life, like a snowball-Sir John getting rounder, and bigger, and whiter, at every push.

And now we approach that period in our hero's life, when his acts are public history. Our task grows lighter, our responsibility heavier. Hitherto we have had to treat merely of Achilles in girl's petticoats, Cæsar at school, Cromwell at the mash-tub, Bonaparte besieging snow castles. Now we are in sight of our hero's Troy, Rubicon, Marston Moor, Toulon - whatever the reader pleases.

Sir John Falstaff will next appear in these pages as the ripe full-blown Falstaff of Shakspeare, the fat knight par excellence, the hero of Gadshill and of Shrewsbury; on the eve of the former of which great engagements we are supposed to resume the thread of our narrative.

And here it may be as well that the historian and his reader should at once understand each other as to the purport of this work.

It is impossible that a man should take the pains of research and compilation necessary for a voluminous biography without the preliminary inspiration of deep sympathy with, and exalted admiration for the character of his subject. This is, at any rate, indispensable to the satisfactory execution of his task. None but a man with a turn for such achievements as usually result in solitary confinement could have written the "Life of Robinson Crusoe." The "Newgate Calendar" would not be the work it is, had not the last and present centuries been prolific in writers who, under a trifling depression of circumstances, might have changed places with their heroes.

I do not mean to say, that had I lived in the fifteenth century I should have been a Sir John Falstaff. Morally, in his position, I should have cut as sorry a

figure as, physically, in his garments.

Boswells need not be Johnsons.

Sympathy and admiration, I repeat, are the necessary qualifications. I sympathise with, and admire the HEROIC CHARACTER as developed in all ages; and I look upon Sir John Falstaff as the greatest hero of his own epoch.

Earthly greatness, like everything else to which the same adjective applies, is comparative to be measured only by besetting difficulties.

The Italian captive, who blots down his autobiography on fragments of old linen, with his forefinger nail nibbed into a pen, and dipped in an exasperatingly gritty fluid of soot and water, is not to be tested by the same severe rules of criticism as the literary patrician, writing in his well filled library, to the mellifluous gurgle of his eastern pipe, and with every advantage that Bath post, gold pens, Webster's dictionaries, and the most carefully annotated editions of Lindley Murray can offer. As just would it be to compare the struggling unguided crudities of a mere Shakspeare or Eschylus, with the more polished productions of a modern dramatist, in the enjoyment of private means, and a troisième on the Boulevard des Italiens, having a running contract with the nearest theatrical printer for the earliest first-proof sheets of his publications. Mr. Hobbs, the American locksmith, with his multifarious means and appliances of picklocks, "tumblers," and what not, is entitled to our respect as a skilful mechanician; but placed in comparison with Jack Sheppard and his rusty nail, what becomes of Hobbs and his reputation?

It has been beautifully observed of Sir John Falstaff (by no less an authority than himself), that having more flesh than most men, he should be excused for displaying a greater amount of that frailty to which flesh is heir. On the other hand, having fewer advantages than most heroes, he may easily be proved to have displayed a more than proportionate share of heroism.

I consider it too late in the day to attempt a new definition of the word hero. The world has been agreed for ages upon the only acceptation of which it is susceptible,—namely, a man who takes a more than common advantage of his fellow-creatures in furtherance of his own interests, or those of his nation, county, township, street, row of houses, family, or self. Exclusive devotion to the latter interest marks the real hero. But this is a demi-god pitch of excellence rarely attained. Even Sir John Falstaff fell short of it.

Achilles was invulnerable (with a contemptible exception of which the oversight is a disgrace to the shoe-making science of the period), and had a supernatural mother to look after him. I think little of his heroism. Cæsar, as we have seen, had the vast advantage of almost unlimited credit. Cromwell had the majority of a nation at his back ;-so had Napoleon.

FALSTAFF A KNIGHT-ERRANT.

51

Sir John Falstaff won a hero's laurels, and attained a hero's ends) which may be briefly summed up as the privilege of doing pretty much as you like at the expense of other people), by the almost unaided exercise of his head and arm. Is he to be blamed for only having gained purses, where Cæsar or Alexander pocketed kingdoms? As ridiculous would it be to find fault with him for making no greater speed than four miles an hour from the disputed field of Gadshill, because swift travelling carriages had not been invented. Imagine Napoleon with fifty-eight years and thirty stone of flesh at his back, and none but pedestrian means of exit from Moscow before him! Who would ever have heard of Waterloo or St. Helena ?

It may be objected, that of the recognised heroes I have cited for comparison, two at least (the last mentioned of the number) were originally actuated by the desire to free an oppressed people. Here, even, the parallel does not fail. Sir John Falstaff, too, had his subjects and followers, whose condition required ameliorating. It is true that these were limited in number, and that their most stringent oppressions were the severe debtor and creditor laws of the period, aggravated by a season of scarcity in the matter of wages. But, as I have said before, every thing in this world is comparative.

A great deal of misconception as to my hero's real character, may be traced to a deplorable ignorance of the time in which he lived. Many celebrated writers on the Falstaffian era (that is to say, people who know nothing at all about it) have declared the age of chivalry, in that great man's time, to have been extinct. This has led modern thinkers-who, according to the improved lights of their age, look upon speculations on the Stock Exchange, joint-stock banks, Samaritan institutions, cheap clothing warehouses, the adulteration of coffee, pickles, &c. &c., as the only legitimate means of plundering your neighbours to apply harsh names to the more primitive mode of transferring capital adopted by our hero. The fact is, Sir John Falstaff was a knighterrant,the only one of his time, perhaps the last ray of the setting sun of chivalry, if you will; but its most gorgeous! To paraphrase the words of an eminent historian, "he was the greatest, as well as the last, of those mighty vagabonds who formerly overhauled the purses of the community, and rendered the people incapable of paying the necessary expenses of their legal prosecution." He was, in short, the Earl of Warwick of knight-errantry. Let us prove our theory by an extension of the parallel lines.

renown.

The knight-errant of antiquity rode out, armed at all points, to win Even in the most Arcadian times, the acquisition of that commodity appears to have been contingent on the display of a certain amount of spoil, in the shape of weapons, prisoners, ransoms, and so forth. The public enemies against whom the knight-errant's attention was chiefly directed, were—

1. Giants.

Which, I take to mean, people who had grown so big as to require more land and larger houses to live on and in than their neighbours.

2. Magicians; i. e. people rather cleverer than their non-conjuring fellow-citizens.

It will be admitted that Sir John Falstaff did a great man's best to reduce the influence of these two varieties in his own favour.

The knights-errant had their esquires and men-at-arms, who were allowed the privilege of fighting under their leader's banner. It was not customary for the chroniclers of the period to mention the names of these subordinate personages. The dawn of a more equitable state of things, in this respect, may be traced to the time of Falstaff. The names of his immediate followers have been honourably preserved.

The list is as follows:

1. P. Bardolph, Esquire.

[The ancient title of Esquire has been recently much abused; being assumed by mere writers, painters, and even members of the legal professions. Though it originally meant nothing more than "ostler," in those barbarous times, when manual labour was not a positive disgrace, yet, in the heyday of chivalry, it was promoted to an equivalent of "bearer of arms." Esquireship was the brevet rank of knighthood. The esquire, in order to become a knight, having served his lord faithfully for a certain number of years, was expected to sit up all night watching the arms by which he had earned distinction. These, in the case of Bardolph, adopting the heraldic acceptation of the word "arms,"-may be described as a bottle gules, on an oak table proper, with a corkscrew trenchant, supported by thirst rampant. These Bardolph is known to have sat up watching, not merely all one night, but for several hundred nights in succession. And yet this gallant soldier never attained to the distinction of knighthood. It is true that gentle blood was an indispensable qualification for the honour. Bardolph's blood was not gentle, but of the most obstinately opposite description. Coax it as he would, it persisted in flying to his nose.] .

2. Pistol, Ancient.

[Ancient-pardon the apparent contradiction of terms,—is a comparatively modern expression, certainly not dating further back than the time of Falstaff. The term has been corrupted into " Ensign." In those days, the most "ancient" and proved soldier in the ranks was supposed to earn the right of