It is also comic that his vanity prevents him from suspecting himself of cowardice and evasion of duty; so that he indulges the most inflated self-appreciation, and no misadventure is sharp enough to prick it. "Embowelled! 'Sblood, 'twas time to counterfeit." And his fright inspires him with the adage dear ever since to shirkers, "The better part of valor is discretion;" and it has a sensible purport which blinds him to his own disgrace. "There is not a dangerous action," complains he to the Chief Justice, "but I am thrust upon it. Well, I cannot last ever. But it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. I would to God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is." Does he really think his bullying style is a perpetual action of bravery, or is he delighting to be ironical upon himself?

Now Falstaff's mind has many a talent which liberates it from the grossness of his body. His wit shows a nimble foot of fancy. His common-sense is an acute ally of his cowardice. The imagination which betrays him into the largeness of his lying goes into the felicity of his wit: both are on an ample scale. He rallies Bardolph for his complexion, and overwhelms his ragged company with comparisons, just as his men in buckram grow in number. When his fancy seizes an opportunity he cannot let it go, but unconsciously shifts it into all possible lights, and exhausts invention to make the point emphatic. How many imaginative people there are who unconsciously lie in the same way with their exaggerated raptures at a landscape, their wholesale contributions to an occurrence! The flavor of stories improves by going to sea upon their bounding fancies. Only give them time enough and a free swing among their friends, and an event of the chimney-corner will become bewitched into a Cinderella at the ball. These people really believe with the imagination instead of with the understanding; and, if conscience is comparatively weak, common-sense is not a sufficient curb to their career.

Falstaff's ragged soldiers have hearts "no bigger than pins' heads." "A mad fellow met me on the way, and told me that I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies. There's but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half-shirt is two napkins tacked together." This fanciful destitution reminds us of an American improvement upon it, attributed to a man the smallest hole in whose shirt was that for the head, so ragged that it had to be washed by the dozen.

All of Falstaff's speeches are one crescendo of phrases; each seems to breed the next one, and they swarm in his fancy like gnats in a broad sun. Bardolph's red features are very tropics to yield spicy railing to him. The ginger of it is hot in the mouth. He never sees that face but he thinks upon hell-fire, and Dives in his purple, burning. He imagines he saw it running up Gad's Hill in the pitchy dark, and took it for an ignis-fatuus. It has saved him a good deal of money in links and torches.

We come upon the same vein in the "Comedy of Errors," where Dromio says, "Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench, and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to, but to make a lamp of her, and run from her by her own light. I warrant her rags, and the tallow in them, will burn a Poland winter: if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world."

Falstaff might have said of himself that "wherever his shadow falls it leaves a grease-spot."

Shakspeare evidently relished these unctuous conceits, for in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," when Falstaff's wooing in the forest is suddenly interrupted, he says, "I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that is in me should set hell on fire; he would never else cross me thus."

There is sometimes in Shakspeare an exaggeration of this kind which has a Titanic grasp to it that throttles laughter just as it meditates escape. The grotesque and humorous element is stunned by a fierce and passionate feeling, such as Dante might have steeped one of the circles of his Inferno in. A specimen of this may be found in "Henry VIII.," where Lord Abergavenny, talking about Wolsey's low-born greatness, says:

"But I can see his pride
Peep through each part of him: whence has he that?
If not from hell, the devil is a niggard;
Or has given all before, and he begins
A new hell in himself."

All the followers of Falstaff catch his habit of improving Bardolph's redness. The Page could not distinguish his face through a red lattice, but, at last spying his eyes, thought he had made two holes in a new red petticoat to peep through. And, after Falstaff is dead, a boy recalls his fanciful notion that a flea sticking upon Bardolph's nose was a black soul burning in hell. A specimen worthy of Falstaff is found in an ancient Greek epigram which celebrates a nose so long that the owner could never hear himself sneeze. But Falstaff's imagination is so prolific that we feel as if a great many of these comments on the text of Bardolph's nose had not come down to us.