_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."

* * * * *

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.

* * *