and not to deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me; as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him: hark! hark! the trumpets and drums; he comes, master Shallow, he comes! Here king Henry the Fifth and his train approach ; the lord chief justice being among the number of his attendants: Falstaff continues: Heaven save thy grace, king Hal! my royal Hal! [K. Henry V.] My lord chief justice, speak to that vain man. [speak? [Ch. Justice.] Have you your wits? know you what 'tis you [Falstaff] My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart! [K. Hen. V.] I know thee not, old man :-fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dream'd of such a kind of man, As Falstaff moves onward, he thus speaks to his friend : [Falstaff] Master Shallow, I owe vou a thousand pounds. [Shallow.] Ay, marry, Sir John; which I beseech you to let me have home with me. [Falstaff] That can hardly be, master Shallow. Do not you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him: he must seem thus to the world. Fear not your advancement: I shall be the man yet that will make you great. [Shallow.] I cannot perceive how, unless you give me your doublet, and stuff me out with straw. I beseech you, let me have five hundred of my thousand. [Falstaff] I will be as good as my word: this that you heard was but a colour: come; come with me to dinner. I shall be sent for soon at night :-come! The king, observing much surprise, mingled with doubt, among the members of his train, again addresses the lord chief justice: [K. Hen. V.] Still all look strangely; and you most, my lord: You are, I think, assur'd, I love you not. [Ch. Justice.] I am assur'd, if I be measur'd rightly, Your majesty hath no just cause to hate me. [K. Hen. V.] No? Might a prince of my great hopes forget So great indignity you laid upon me? What! rate, rebuke, and roughly send to prison [Ch. Justice.] I then did use the person of your father; To trip the course of law, and blunt the sword [K. Hen. V.] You are right, justice, and you weigh this well: I now, my lord, commit unto your hand The unstain'd sword that you are us'd to bear, As you have done 'gainst me. There is my hand : And I will stoop and humble my intents In company with King Henry, we have taken leave of Falstaff: but some remarks concluding his history, will perhaps be permitted : "We wish to know," says the author of the Essay on Falstaff formerly referred to, "what course the knight is afterwards to take: for he lives by detection, and thrives by disgrace. Nor is a period put to our curiosity by the conclusion of the play, as with other characters, since he is not, like them, involved in the fortune of the play: he was en gaged in no action which, as to him, was to be completed, but he passes through each play as a lawless meteor. He must therefore have man's natural ending-an historical, and not a mere dramatic finish. Shakspeare, accordingly, in an epilogue to the scenes just terminated, threatened that, in another play, he would perhaps make Falstaff die of a sweat, which" says the essayist, "would have been no unsuitable catastrophe. But we have reason to be satisfied as it is his death is worthy of his birth, and of his life.” It will be remembered, that Falstaff answers the lord chief justice's allegation of age, by saying, "He was born about three o'clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly." If he came into the world in the evening with these marks of age, he departs out of it in the morning, in all the vanities and follies of youth. learn in a following play from Hostess Quickly, and other his illiterate companions, He was shaked with a burning quotidian tertian; the young king had run bad humours on the knight; his heart was fracted and corroborate; and a' parted just between twelve and one, even at the turning of the tide, yielding the crow a pudding, and passing into Arthur's bosom" (the landlady thinks she quotes Scripture), if ever man went into Arthur's bosom." And this is Falstaff's end; the end of one who scruples no means to use the world, and whom, in return, the world uses, caresses, humours, indulges,—and then casts aside. As we We only hear of Falstaff, as above, in the next historical play, but he appears in a third: and there is a tradition, that Shakspeare wrote this third play, namely, the Merry Wives of Windsor, at the request of Queen Elizabeth. Appearances are in favour of this report. There is no room for the events of the Merry Wives of Windsor in Falstaff's life, if we adhere to the thread of the story as furnished in the two parts of Henry IV. The renewal of his acquaintance with Shallow, on coming for recruits, evidently supposes there had been no intercourse between them since the days of their youth and if the king's death is imagined to take place on receiving the news from Yorkshire of the termination of the rebellion, and Falstaff is with Justice Shallow at that time, there is no opportunity at which he and the justice could be at Windsor, but after his dismissal from the king's favour. The fact is, that the character and the life of Falstaff were complete in the poet's mind, before the Merry Wives was written. In point of historical truth, however, king Henry the Fourth lived more than six years after the time that Falstaff is supposed to return from Gaultree forest, through Gloucestershire: and we may, if we like, assign the events of the Merry Wives of Windsor to some part of that interval, though the poet, whose creature Falstaff is, certainly leaves no room for them, except between his dismissal from court, and his death at the Boar's-head Tavern. THE GROWING DISPOSITION OF THE COMMONS TO APPROPRIATE FOR CIVIL USES THE TEMPORALITIES OF THE CHURCH; THE PREPARATIONS TO INVADE FRANCE; THE DETECTION OF THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE KING; AND OTHER FACTS OF THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF THE REIGN OF HENRY V.; INDICATED BY SCENES SUPPOSED ΤΟ OCCUR AT THE PALACE IN LONDON, AND SOUTHAMPTON. HISTORICAL MEMORANDA. AT In the sixth of the previous reign (Shakspeare makes it the eleventh) the lords rejected a bill, which the lower house had prepared, for appropriating a certain proportion of the revenues of the church; and the same measure was pressed upon the King early in this reign. To divert the blow, Chichely, the archbishop of Canterbury, by way of giving occupation to the King, persuaded him to the war in France for the recovery of his lost rights; among which was reckoned, the claim to the crown of France itself on the plea first set up by Edward III., whose mother Isabella was daughter of Philip the Fair of France. Led by these persuasions, and still more by his own ambitious spirit, the King determined to invade France, and in 1415 his armament was ready at Southampton. Here, before he sailed, he discovered a conspiracy in favour of the earl of Marche, which had been formed by the earl of Cambridge, who had married the sister of that nobleman, and had persuaded Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Grey to join with him. We are to imagine, in an ante-chamber at the English court, the archbishop of Canterbury in converse with the bishop of Ely. |