Ch. Just. “_Well, the King has served you and Prince Henry. I hear you are going with Lord John of Lancaster against the Archbishop and the Earl of Northumberland._” Fals. “_Yes, I thank your pretty sweet wit for it; but look you pray, all you that kiss my lady peace at home, that our armies join not in a hot day; for I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily: If it be a hot day, if I brandish any thing but a bottle, would I might never spit white again. There is not a dangerous action can peep out his head but I am thrust upon it. Well I cannot last for ever.—But it was always the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing to make it too common. If you will needs say I am an old man you should give me rest: I would to God my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is. I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scour’d to nothing with perpetual motion._” Ch. Just. “_Well be honest, be honest, and heaven bless your expedition._” _Falstaff_ indulges himself here in humourous exaggeration;—these passages are not meant to be taken, nor are we to suppose that they were taken, literally;—but if there was not a ground of truth, if _Falstaff_ had not had such a degree of Military reputation as was capable of being thus humourously amplified and exaggerated, the whole dialogue would have been highly preposterous and absurd, and the acquiescing answer of the _Lord Chief Justice_ singularly improper.—But upon the supposition of _Falstaff_’s being considered, upon the whole, as a good and gallant Officer, the answer is just, and corresponds with the acknowledgment which had a little before been made, “_that his days service at Shrewsbury had gilded over his night’s exploit at Gads Hill.—You may thank the unquiet time,_” says the Chief Justice, “_for your quiet o’erposting of that action_”; agreeing with what _Falstaff_ says in another place;—“_Well, God be thanked for these Rebels, they offend none but the virtuous; I laud them, I praise them._”—Whether this be said in the true spirit of a Soldier or not, I do not determine; it is surely not in that of a mere Coward and Poltroon.