“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.

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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 would laugh, yet perhaps with more courage and good-nature than the laughers.”

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Ford’s jealousy is managed with great skill so as to help on the plot, bringing on a series of the richest incidents, and drawing the most savoury issues from the mellow, juicy old sinner upon whom he is practising.  The means whereby he labours to justify his passion, spreading temptations and then concerting surprises, are quite as wicked as any thing Falstaff does, and have, besides, the further