Perhaps!—— but he chases away the intrusive reflection by another cup of sack and a fresh sally of humour.
Dryden maintained that Shakspeare killed Mercutio, because, if he had not, Mercutio would have killed him. In spite of the authority of
"All those prefaces of Dryden, For these our critics much confide in,"
Glorious John is here mistaken. Mercutio is killed precisely in the part of the drama where his death is requisite. Not an incident, scarcely a sentence, in this most skilfully managed play of Romeo and Juliet, can be omitted or misplaced. But I do think that Shakspeare was unwilling to hazard the reputation of Falstaff by producing him again in connexion with his old companion, Hal, on the stage. The dancer in the epilogue of the Second Part of Henry IV. promises the audience, that "if you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France; where, for any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already he be killed with your hard opinions."[96] The audience was not cloyed with fat meat, Sir John was not killed with their hard opinions; he was popular from the first hour of his appearance: but Shakspeare never kept his word. It was the dramatist, not the public, who killed his hero in the opening scenes of Henry V; for he knew not how to interlace him with the story of Agincourt. There Henry was to be lord of all; and it was matter of necessity that his old master should disappear from the scene. He parted therefore even just between twelve and one, e'en at turning of the tide, and we shall never see him again until the waters of some Avon, here or elsewhere,—it is a good Celtic name for rivers in general,—shall once more bathe the limbs of the like of him who was laid for his last earthly sleep under a gravestone bearing a disregarded inscription, on the north side of the chancel in the great church at Stratford.
W. M.
EPIGRAM
'Twas thought that all who dined on hare, For seven days after, grew most fair: Fanny, it seems, this tale believed, When I from her a hare received: But if the tale be true, odsfish! Fanny has never tried the dish.