the very pirates could hardly have passed over or struck out.  They are not such as can drop from the text of a poet unperceived by the very dullest and horniest of human eyes.  “The king has killed his heart.”  Here is the point in Falstaff’s nature so strangely overlooked by the man of all men who we should have said must be the first to seize and to appreciate it.  It is as grievous as it is inexplicable that the Shakespeare of France—­the most infinite in compassion, in “conscience and tender heart,” of all great poets in all ages and all nations of the world—­should have missed the deep tenderness of this supreme and subtlest touch in the work of the greatest among his fellows.  Again, with anything but “damnable” iteration, does Shakespeare revert to it before the close of this very scene.  Even Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their old master is no such ailment as in his prosperous days was but too liable to “play the rogue with his great toe.”  “The king hath run bad humours on the knight”:  “his heart is fracted, and corroborate.”  And it is not thus merely through the eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect “of Africa, and golden joys,” in view of which he was ready to “take any man’s horses.”  This it is that distinguishes Falstaff from Panurge; that lifts him at least to the moral level of Sancho Panza.  I cannot but be reluctant to set the verdict of my own judgment against that of Victor Hugo’s; I need none to remind me what and who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, and what and who am I that I should oppose it; that he is he, and I am but myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against his definition of Shakespeare’s unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece in the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with all my soul and strength protest.  The admirable phrase of “swine-centaur” (centaure du porc) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriate to Panurge.  Not the third person but the first in date of that divine and human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the Century of their new-born glory—­not Shakespeare but Rabelais is responsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this. “Suum cuique is our Roman justice”; the gradation from Panurge to Falstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo’s very self who asserts the contrary. {108} Singular as may seem the collocation of the epithet “moral” with the name “Falstaff,” I venture to maintain my thesis; that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior of Panurge.  The natural affection of Panurge is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike at one point;

            Myself,
   And this great belly, first of deities;