t keeping in the boundless luxury of
his imagination and the pampered self-indulgence of his physical
appetites. He manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his
body with sack and sugar. He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon or
a haunch of venison, where there is _cut and come again_; and pours out
upon them the oil of gladness. His tongue drops fatness, and in the
chambers of his brain "it snows of meat and drink." He keeps up perpetual
holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to
a rump and dozen.--Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere
sensualist. All this is as much in imagination as in reality. His
sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but "ascends
me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ
it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes." His
imagination keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it. He seems
to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good
cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated description
which he gives of them, than in fact. He never fails to enrich his
discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, but we never see him at
table. He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself "a tun
of man." His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to
shew his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic
adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances.
Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does
not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess's bill, found in
his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with
only one halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick
to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious
caricature of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward,
a glutton, etc. and yet we are not offended but delighted with him; for he
is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself. He openly
assumes all these characters to shew the humourous part of them. The
unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and convenience, has
neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself
almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the character
of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringi