according to its extent, and the richness of the soil.  Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sensation; an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of others, from feeling none in itself.  Falstaff’s wit is an emanation of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good-nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter, and good-fellowship; a giving vent to his heart’s ease and over-contentment with himself and others.  He would not be in character, if he were not so fat as he is; for there is the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the pampered self-indulgence of his physical appetites.  He manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar.  He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon, or a haunch of venison, where there is cut and come again; and pours out upon them the oil of gladness.  His tongue drops fatness, and in the chambers of his brain ’it snows of meat and drink’.  He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.—­Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist.  All this is as much in imagination as in reality.  His sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but ’ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes’.  His imagination keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it.  He seems to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated descriptions which he gives of them, than in fact.  He never fails to enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, but we never see him at table.  He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself ‘a tun of man’.  His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to show his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances.  Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess’s bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious caricature of himself.  He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, a glutton, &c., and yet we are not offended but delighted with him; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself, He openly assumes all these characters to show the humorous part of them.  The unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it.  In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent