perilous conclusions drawn from his faith. This is a
difficulty, for Falstaff is not entirely the Englishman of to-day; he is
largely the boisterous, Latinised Englishman of the pre-Reformation
period; he is almost the typical Roman Catholic, who preserved through
his sinful life a consciousness that faith would save him. But the human
sides of Falstaff are wholly English; his love of meat and drink, his
sleepiness, his gout, his coarseness (which was free from depravity),
all these live to-day in the average Englishman of the
well-to-do-classes, that Englishman who dislikes the motor-car but
keeps a hunter he is too fat to ride, who prefers suet pudding to any
hotel _bavaroise_, and who, despite his gout (inherited from Falstaff),
is still a judge of port.

That Englishman is not quite Falstaff, for he has lost his gaiety; he
does not dance round the maypole of Merrie England; he is oppressed by
cares and expenditures, he fears democracy and no longer respects
aristocracy: the old banqueting-hall in which Falstaff rioted is
tumbling about his ears. Yet he contains the Falstaffian elements and
preciously preserves them. He is no poet, but he still enshrines within
him, to burst out from among his sons, the rich lyrical verse which, Mr
Chesterton truly says, belongs primarily to the English race. The poetry
which runs through Falstaff is still within us, and his philosophy
radiates from our midst. The broad tolerances of England, her taste for
liberty and ease, her occasional bluster and her boundless conceit, all
these are Falstaffian traits and would be eternal if admixture of Celtic
blood did not slowly modify them. Falstaff contains all that is gross in
England and much that is fine; his cowardice, his craft, his capacity
for flattery are qualifying factors, for they are not English, any more
than they are Chinese: they are human, common. But the outer Falstaff is
English, and the lawless root of him is yet more English, for there is
not a race in the world hates the law more than the English race. Thus
the inner, adventurous Falstaff is the Englishman who conquered every
sea and planted his flag among the savages; he is perhaps the Englishman
who went out to those savages with the Bible in his hand; he is the
unsteady boy who ran away to sea, the privateersman who fought the
French and the Dutch; he is the cheerful, greedy, dull, and obstinate
Englishman, who is so wonderfully stupid and so wonderfully full of
commo