Still I do not think I went far in the more modern authors, or gave my heart to any of them.  Suddenly, it was now given to Shakespeare, without notice or reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked him too, and that we found it a double pleasure to read him together.  Printers in the old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or less, and I suppose I could not have kept away from him much longer in the nature of things.  I cannot fix the time or place when my friend and I began to read him, but it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition of ours, and presently we had great lengths of him by heart, out of “Hamlet,” out of “The Tempest,” out of “Macbeth,” out of “Richard III.,” out of “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” out of the “Comedy of Errors,” out of “Julius Caesar,” out of “Measure for Measure,” out of “Romeo and Juliet,” out of “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

These were the plays that we loved, and must have read in common, or at least at the same time:  but others that I more especially liked were the Histories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaff appeared.  This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy.  I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph, and Nym.  I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was a personal pang to me when the prince, crowned king, denied him:  blackguard for blackguard, I still think the prince the worse blackguard.  Perhaps I flatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen, I fully conceived of Falstaff’s character, and entered into the author’s wonderfully humorous conception of him.  There is no such perfect conception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception is all the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice of Falstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow, though a merry companion.  I am not sure but I should put him beside Hamlet, and on the name level, for the merit of his artistic completeness, and at one time I much preferred him, or at least his humor.

As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather fastidious, and would not have made friends with him in the flesh, much or little.  I revelled in all his appearances in the Histories, and I tried to be as happy where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to life again in the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” though at the bottom of my heart I felt the difference.  I began to make my imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 57 out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph talked together, in that Ercles vein which is so easily caught.  This was after a year or two of the irregular and interrupted acquaintance with the author which has been my mode of friendship with all the authors I have loved.  My worship of Shakespeare went to heights and lengths that it had reached with no earlier idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I found myself saying that the creation of Shakespeare was as great as the creation of a planet.