P. Henry.  I do, I will.

[Knocking; and Hostess and Bardolph go out.]

Re-enter Bardolph, running.

Bardolph.  O, my lord, my lord; the sheriff, with a most monstrous watch, is at the door.

Falstaff.  Out, you rogue! play out the play:  I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff.

One of the most characteristic descriptions of Sir John is that which Mrs. Quickly gives of him when he asks her, ’What is the gross sum that I owe thee?’

Hostess.  Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself, and the money too.  Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire on Wednesday in Whitsunweek, when the prince broke thy head for likening his father to a singing man of Windsor; thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady thy wife.  Canst thou deny it?  Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher’s wife, come in then, and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us, she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee, they were ill for a green wound?  And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying, that ere long they should call me madam?  And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?  I put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it, if thou canst.

This scene is to us the most convincing proof of Falstaff’s power of gaining over the goodwill of those he was familiar with, except indeed Bardolph’s somewhat profane exclamation on hearing the account of his death, ’Would I were with him, wheresoe’er he is, whether in heaven or hell.’

One of the topics of exulting superiority over others most common in Sir John’s mouth is his corpulence and the exterior marks of good living which he carries about him, thus ’turning his vices into commodity’.  He accounts for the friendship between the Prince and Poins, from ‘their legs being both of a bigness’; and compares Justice Shallow to ‘a man made after supper of a cheese-paring’.  There cannot be a more striking gradation of character than that between Falstaff and Shallow, and Shallow and Silence.  It seems difficult at first to fall lower than the squire; but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer and humble foil in his cousin Silence.  Vain of his acquaintance with Sir John, who makes a butt of him, he exclaims, ’Would, cousin Silence, that thou had’st seen that which this knight and I have seen!’—­’Aye, Master Shallow, we have heard the chimes at midnight,’ says Sir John.  To Falstaff’s observation, ’I did not think Master Silence had been a man of this mettle’, Silence answers, ’Who, I?  I have been merry twice and once ere now.’  What an idea is here conveyed of a prodigality of living?  What good husbandry and economical self-denial in his pleasures?  What a stock of lively recollections?  It is curious that Shakespeare has ridiculed in Justice Shallow, who was ’in some authority under the king’, that disposition to unmeaning tautology which is the regal infirmity of later times, and which, it may be supposed, he acquired from talking to his cousin Silence, and receiving no answers.