MISADVENTURES AT WINDSOR. 193 joking Berkshire housewives. It is distressing to contemplate a man whom we have seen cross swords with Douglas; capture Colevile of the Grange; and who, after all (as hath been demonstrated), there is strong reason to believe, was the actual slayer of the terrible Henry Percy — sunk so low as to receive without resentment a sound cudgelling administered, in a fit of insensate jealousy, by a bourgeois inhabitant of Peascod Street, Windsor—who, for aught I can discover to the contrary, may have been a retired grocer. It may be urged that Sir John Falstaff, in justice to his knightly standing, could not challenge an ignoble curmudgeon like Ford to mortal combat; and that he acted becomingly in preferring the more appropriate vengeance of keeping that citizen's money - intrusted to him for an avowedly immoral purpose. This was all very well in its way, but did not wipe out the original outrage. That shameful business of the buck-basket, also, was an indignity to which Sir John in the heyday of his powers could never have submitted. "Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at him" with a vengeance, at this time, and the meanest are permitted to do so with impunity. His very retainers turn against him (always excepting the faithful Bardolph, who relieves his master, when under the pressure of pecuniary difficulties, of the cost of his maintenance, by turning tapster and waiting on the knight at another person's expense). He is even braved by Pistol; and that "drawling, affecting rogue," Nym, refuses to carry his messages. He is cajoled, hoaxed, bamboozled. He suffers himself to be "made an ass" in Windsor Park, where he exposes himself in a tom-fool disguise, and gets pinched by all the charity boys and girls in the parish, believing them to be avenging fairies. He is bound to admit that his wit has been "made a Jack a Lent of." A Cambrian parson, even, dares to laugh at him; and he is "not able to answer the Welsh flannel." It is a sad business. I repeat that I have no heart to dwell upon these painful details. Shakspeare has not scrupled to particularise them, and the curious are referred to his able but pitiless pages. My good friend George Cruikshank also — an amiable man in the social relations of life, but who when there is a stern truth to be recorded pictorially, has no more feeling than the sun peering through a photographic lens has added his testimony to the principal features of the case. Let my feelings be spared-for I sympathise with poor Sir Jack, and, with all his faults, love him. There is this excuse to be urged for Sir John Falstaff's submitting to all kinds of temporary inconvenience and degradation at the hands of the contemptible citizens of Windsor. His mind was occupied with more exalted * For the events here referred to, see the Merry Wives of Windsor. บ |