are commonly distanced by a full purse and a handsome person.  His incomparable art in turning adversities into commodities; the good-humoured strategy whereby he manages to divert off all unpleasant feeling of his vices and frailties; the marvellous agility and aptness of wit which, with a vesture of odd and whimsical constructions, at once hides the offensive and discovers the comical features of his conduct; the same towering impudence and effrontery which so lift him aloft in his more congenial exploits; and the overpowering eloquence of exaggeration with which he delights to set off and heighten whatever is most ludicrous in his own person or situation;—­all these qualities, though not in their full bloom and vigour, are here seen in triumphant exercise.

On the whole, this bringing-forth of Sir John rather for exposure than for exhibition is not altogether grateful to those whom he has so often made to “laugh and grow fat.”  Though he still gives us wholesome shakings, we feel that it costs him too much:  the rare exhilaration he affords us elsewhere, and even here, invests him with a sort of humorous reverence; insomuch that we can scarce help pitying even while we approve his merited, yet hardly merited, shames and failures.  Especially it touches us something hard that one so wit-proud as Sir John should be thus dejected, and put to the mortification of owning that “ignorance itself is a plummet o’er me”; of having to “stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English”; and of asking, “Have I laid my brain in the sun, and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o’er-reaching as this?” and we would fain make out some excuse for him on the score of these slips having occurred at a time in his life when experience had not yet disciplined away the natural vanity which may sometimes lead a man of genius to fancy himself an object of the tender passion.  And we are the more disposed to judge leniently of Falstaff, inasmuch as his merry persecutors are but a sort of decorous, respectable, commonplace people, who borrow their chief importance from the victim of their mischievous sport; and if they are not so bad as to make us wish him success, neither are they so good that we like to see them thrive at his expense.  On this point Mr. Verplanck, it seems to me, has spoken just about the right thing:  “Our choler would rise, despite of us, against Cleopatra herself, should she presume to make a dupe and tool of regal old Jack, the natural lord and master of all about him; and, though not so atrociously immoral as to wish he had succeeded with the Windsor gypsies, we plead guilty to the minor turpitude of sympathy, when he tells his persecutors, with brightening visage and exultant twinkle of eye, ’I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced.’”