experienced, he has stronger arguments than before of
the game practised on him; still the deep spell on his judgment
continues unbroken: and now the very shame and grief of his past
failures and punishments seem to co-operate with his palsy of reason
in preparing him for a third hoax even more gross and palpable than
the former two.

When at length the untrussed hero is made to see how matters have been
carried with him, and to feel the chagrin of being so egregiously
fooled, he is indeed cast down to the lowest notes of self-contempt;
and though he so far rallies at last as to cover his retreat with
marked skill, yet he leaves the path behind him strewn thick with the
sweat-drops of his mortification. In his pride of wit and cleverness,
he had looked with scorn upon plain common people as no better than
blockheads; and had only thought to use them, and even his own powers
of mind, for compassing the means of animal gratification. But he now
stands thoroughly degraded in his own sight, and this too in the very
points where he had built his conceit of superiority. He finds that
all his wit and craft were not enough to prevent even Sir Hugh, the
simple-minded Welsh parson, from making him a laughing-stock. We too,
whose moral judgment may have been seduced from the right by the
fascinations of his intellectual playing, are brought to estimate more
justly the natural honours and safeguards of downright integrity and
innocence; and to see that the deepest shrewdness stands in not
thinking to be shrewd at all. Thus our judgment of the man is set
right in the very point where it was most liable to be drawn astray.
Gervinus regards this idea as being the soul of the piece. He thinks
the Poet's leading purpose here was to teach that plain-thoughted,
guileless honesty is a natural overmatch for studied cunning; and to
show how self-seeking craft and intricacy are apt to be caught in the
snares they have laid for others, while unselfish truth and simplicity
are protected against them by those instinctive moral warnings of
nature which crafty men despise. And he rightly observes 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 "