“What! old acquaintance! could not all this flesh
Keep in a little life?
Poor Jack, farewell!
I could have better spar’d a better man.
O! I should have a heavy miss of thee,
If I were much in love with vanity.
Death hath not struck so fat a deer to-day,
Though many dearer, in this bloody fray.
Embowell’d will I see thee by and by;
Till then, in blood by noble Percy lie.”
Having delivered himself of this laboured composition, the Prince of Wales went away to tell his father what a clever thing he had done.
And then Sir John Falstaff—got up! He had had ample breathing time, and felt, upon the whole, much better. He had sufficiently recovered his faculties to overhear and understand the concluding phrases of the Prince’s soliloquy.
“Embowelled!” said Jack, rising slowly (the expression is Shakspeare’s);
“If thou embowel me to-day, I’ll give you leave to powder me, and eat me
“to-morrow. ‘Sblood, ‘twas time to counterfeit, or that hot, termagant Scot
“had paid me scot and lot too. Counterfeit! I lie; I am no counterfeit.
“To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath
“not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth,
“is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The
“better part of valour is—discretion; in the which better part I have saved
“my life.”
The unapproachable wisdom of these words, which have claimed the discussion of the subtlest modern commentators, it is too late in the day to dwell upon.
And then Sir John Falstaff looked round and saw the dead body of poor Harry Percy. He was frightened, and confessed himself so. But let it be borne in mind he only confessed it to himself. The bravest are subject to fear. The faculty of apprehension implies comprehension. Lord Nelson had a dread of the sea to his dying day, because he knew it would be sure to make him sick for the first few days of a voyage. “You were frightened,” said a bantering subaltern, after the Battle of Inkermann, to a veteran whose cheeks had turned as white as his hair on entering the action. “Quite true,” said the brave old man, who had been nearly cut to pieces; “if you had been half so frightened as I was, you would have run away.”
