The Life of Sir John Falstaff

by Robert B. Brough

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 Æschylus, 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?