Having made this exclamation, we may suppose that Sir John Falstaff would repair his not very flattering mistake by a plausible apology, or turn it off with a timely jest——either being always at his command at a moment’s notice. Having pacified the by no means implacable Doit, he would muse upon old times—old forms and deeds growing into shape and colour through the fog of years on the dead level of an old man’s memory—like cows and windmills through the morning mist on a Flemish landscape.
“Shallow! to be sure!”—this to himself—sighing and putting his hand to his pocket. “He was the man to know! He paid all! He was a very oyster that would grow fat on the shell again, with a string of pearls round his neck directly you had swallowed him.” Then, aloud, with a deeper sigh—“I would he were living now, Master Lawyer!”
“Why he lives, Sir John.”
“Say you so?—where?”
“Hard by, in Gloucestershire, scarce a day’s ride from hence.”
“In good health and case, I trust?”
“The best. For his bodily health, he is of those men whose backs will never break under the weight of their brains. It is long ere the dock withers or the ass dies. For his outward case, Heaven, in its mercy to helpless creatures, hath sent two kinds of crawling things into the world with good houses to cover them—the snails and the fools, Sir John. Master Shallow is in the Peace: he hath his father’s broad lands and some twenty thousand marks in money.”
“You rejoice me! Master Shallow alive and prospering! Well! Master David Shallow was it not?”
“Robert.”
“True. You called him Bob a while ago. From that you have let fall, it would seem he hath not grown in wisdom as in years and possessions?”