ishonour.--Laughter and approbation
attend his greatest excesses; and being governed visibly by no settled bad
principle or ill design, fun and humour account for and cover all. By
degrees, however, and thro' indulgence, he acquires bad habits, becomes an
humourist, grows enormously corpulent, and falls into the infirmities of
age; yet never quits, all the time, one single levity or vice of youth, or
loses any of that chearfulness of mind which had enabled him to pass thro'
this course with ease to himself and delight to others; and thus, at last,
mixing youth and age, enterprize and corpulency, wit and folly, poverty
and expence, title and buffoonery, innocence as to purpose, and wickedness
as to practice; neither incurring hatred by bad principle, or contempt by
Cowardice, yet involved in circumstances productive of imputation in both;
a butt and a wit, a humourist and a man of humour, a touchstone and a
laughing stock, a jester and a jest, has Sir _John Falstaff_, taken at
that period of his life in which we see him, become the most perfect Comic
character that perhaps ever was exhibited.

It may not possibly be wholly amiss to remark in this place, that if Sir
_John Falstaff_ had possessed any of that Cardinal quality, Prudence,
alike the guardian of virtue and the protector of vice; that quality, from
the possession or the absence of which, the character and fate of men in
this life take, I think, their colour, and not from real vice or virtue;
if he had considered his wit not as _principal_ but _accessary_ only; as
the instrument of power, and not as power itself; if he had had much
baseness to hide, if he had had less of what may be called mellowness or
good humour, or less of health and spirit; if he had spurred and rode the
world with his wit, instead of suffering the world, boys and all, to ride
him;--he might, without any other essential change, have been the
admiration and not the jest of mankind:--Or if he had lived in our day, and
instead of attaching himself to one Prince, had renounced _all_ friendship
and _all_ attachment, and had let himself out as the ready instrument and
Zany of every successive Minister, he might possibly have acquired the
high honour of marking his shroud or decorating his coffin with the living
rays of an Irish at least, if not a British Coronet: Instead of which,
tho' enforcing laughter from every disposition, he appears, now, as such a
character which every wise man will pity and