that the play illustrates the point in repeated instances.  Thus the policy and sharp practice of the Host to catch gain, of Ford to detect and expose the imagined sins of his wife, and of Mr. and Mrs. Page to mismatch their daughter, only bring to confusion the parties themselves; their crafty devices, like Falstaff’s, being outwitted and cheated by the “honest knaveries” of their intended victims.  Thus the several cases concur to enforce the moral, that “an egotist like Falstaff can suffer no severer defeat than from the honesty which he believes not, and from the simplicity which he esteems not.”

I refrain from attempting a full analysis of Sir John’s character, till I encounter him at the noontide of his glory, stealing, drinking, lying, recruiting, warring, and discoursing of wine, wit, valour, and honour, with Prince Hal at hand to wrestle forth the prodigies of his big-teeming brain.

Sir John’s followers are here under a cloud along with him, being little more than the shadows of what they appear when their master is fully himself and in his proper element.  Bardolph and Pistol are indeed the same men, or rather things, as in the History; but the redundant fatness of their several peculiarities is here not a little curtailed:  the fire in Bardolph’s nose waxes dim for lack of fuel; the strut is much dried out of Pistol’s tongue from want of drink to generate loftiness:  the low state of their master’s purse, and the discords thence growing between him and them, have rather soured their tempers, and that sourness rusts and clogs the wheels of their inner man.  Corporal Nym is not visibly met with in King Henry the Fourth, though the atmosphere smells at times as if he had been there; but we have him again in King Henry the Fifth, where he carries to a somewhat higher pitch the character of “a fellow that frights humour out of its wits.”

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I have before observed that the Mrs. Quickly of this play is plainly another individual than the Hostess of Eastcheap:  the latter has known Sir John “these twenty-nine years, come peascod time,” whereas to the former his person is quite unknown till she goes to him with a message from the Windsor wives.  But she seems no very remote kin of the Hostess aforesaid:  though clearly discriminated in character, yet they have a strong family likeness.  Her chief action is in the capacity of a matchmaker and go-between; and her perfect impartiality towards all of Anne Page’s suitors, both in the service she renders and the return she accepts, well exemplifies the indefatigable benevolence of that class of worthies towards themselves, and is so true to the life of a certain perpetual sort of people as almost to make one believe in the transmigration of souls.

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