Sir John Falstaff is the first of these latter, and it is important not to misunderstand him, as certain critics have done, especially among the French. They have looked upon him as a jovial, comic type, a theatrical buffoon, and have compared him with the comic theatrical types of other stages, arriving at the conclusion that he is a less happy and less successful conception than they, because his comicality is exclusively English, and is not to be well understood outside England and America. But we must on the other hand be careful not to interpret the character moralistically, as an image of baseness, darkly coloured with the poet's contempt, as one towards whom he experienced a feeling of disgust. Falstaff could call himself a "formal" hero in his own way: magnificent in ignoring morality and honour, logical, coherent, acute and dexterous. He is a being in whom the sense of honour has never appeared, or has been obliterated, but the intellect has developed and become what alone it could become, namely, _esprit,_ or sharpness of wit. He is without malice, because malice is the antithesis of moral conscientiousness, and he lacks both thesis and antithesis. There is in him, on the contrary, a sort of innocence, the result of the complete liberty of his relation toward all restraint and towards ethical law. His great body, his old sinner's flesh, his complete experience of taverns and lupanars, of rogues male and female, complicates without destroying the soul of the boy that is in him, a very vicious boy, but yet a boy. For this reason, he is sympathetic, that is to say, he is sympathetically felt and lovingly depicted by the poet. The image of a child, that is to say of childish innocence, comes spontaneously to the lips of the hostess, as she tells of how he died: "Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a fine end, and went away, an it had been any Christom child...."