—­Reason thus with life,—­
     If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing,
     That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,
     Servile to all the skyey influences
     That do this habitation, where thou keep’st,
     Hourly afflict:  merely, thou art death’s fool;
     For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
     And yet run’st toward him still:  thou art not noble;
     For all the accommodations, that thou bear’st,
     Are nurs’d by baseness:  thou art by no means valiant;
     For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
     Of a poor worm:  thy best of rest is sleep,
     And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st
     Thy death, which is no more.  Thou art not thyself;
     For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains!;
     That issue out of dust:  happy thou art not;
     For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get;
     And what thou hast, forget’st; thou art not certain;
     For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
     After the moon; if thou art rich, thou art poor;
     For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
     Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
     And death unloads thee:  friend thou hast none;
     For thy own bowels, which do call thee sire,
     The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
     Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
     For ending thee no sooner:  thou hast nor youth, nor age;
     But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
     Dreaming on both:  for all thy blessed youth
     Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
     Of palsied eld; and when thou art old, and rich,
     Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
     To make thy riches pleasant.  What’s yet in this,
     That bears the name of life?  Yet in this life
     Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
     That makes these odds all even.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

The merry wives of Windsor is no doubt a very amusing play, with a great deal of humour, character, and nature in it:  but we should have liked it much better, if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff.  We could have been contented if Shakespeare had not been ‘commanded to show the knight in love’.  Wits and philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character; and Sir John himself by no means comes off with flying colours.  Many people complain of the degradation and insults to which Don Quixote is so frequently exposed in his various adventures.  But what are the unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself?  What are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from the staves of the Yanguesian carriers or from Sancho Panza’s more hard-hearted hands, compared with the contamination