* *

"Mine Host of the Garter" is indeed a model of a host; up to any
thing, and brimful of fun, so that it runs out at the ends of his
fingers; and nothing delights him more than to uncork the wit-holders
of his guests, unless, peradventure, it be to uncork his wine-holders
for them. His exhilarating conceit of practical shrewdness, serving as
oil to make the wheels of his mind run smooth and glib, is choicely
characteristic both of himself individually and of the class he
represents.--Sir Hugh Evans is an odd marriage of the ludicrous and
the honourable. In his officious simplicity he moralizes the play much
better, no doubt, than a wiser man would. The scene where, in
expectation of the fight with Doctor Caius, he is full of "cholers,"
and "trempling of mind," and "melancholies," and has "a great
dispositions to cry," and strikes up a lullaby to the palpitations of
his heart without seeming to know it, while those palpitations in turn
scatter his memory, and discompose his singing, is replete with a
quiet delicacy of humour hardly to be surpassed. It is thought by some
that both he and Caius may be delineations, slightly caricatured, of
what the Poet had seen and conversed with; there being a certain
portrait-like reality and effect about them, with just enough of the
ideal to lift them into the region of art.

* * * * *

Hazlitt boldly pronounces Shakespeare "the only writer who was as
great in describing weakness as strength." However this may be, I am
pretty sure that, after Falstaff, there is not a greater piece of work
in the play than Master Abraham Slender, cousin to Robert Shallow,
Esquire,--a dainty sprout, or rather sapling, of provincial gentry,
who, once seen, is never to be forgotten. In his consequential
verdancy, his aristocratic boobyism, and his lack-brain originality,
this pithless hereditary squireling is quite inimitable and
irresistible;--a tall though slender specimen of most effective
imbecility, whose manners and character must needs all be from within,
because he lacks force of nature to shape or dress himself by any
model. Mr. Hallam, whose judgment in such things is not often at
fault, thinks Slender was intended as "a satire on the brilliant
youth of the provinces," such as they were "before the introduction
of newspapers and turnpike roads; awkward and boobyish among civil
people, but at home in rude sports, and proud of exploits at which the
town