I can well conclude, that, by this time, my readers may be weary of foreign scenes and incidents, as we are of real personages. May I venture then, for the sake of variety, to ask them to accompany me “to the well-trod stage, anon?” There I will treat, to the best of my poor ability, of Stage Knights generally; and first, of the greatest of them all--Sir John Falstaff. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. “I accept that heart Which courts my love in most familiar phrase.”--HEYWOOD. Henry, Earl of Richmond, always creates a favorable impression on young people who see him, for the first time, without knowing much about him, previously, at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard the Third. This is a far higher degree of favor than he merited, for Henry was a very indifferent personage indeed. On the other hand Sir John Falstaff has had injustice done him by the actors; and of Shakespeare’s jolly old _gentleman_ they have made what, down to Macklin’s times, they made of Shylock, a mere mountebank. In the very first scene, in the first part of Henry IV., when the Prince and Sir John appear in company, the knight is, by far, a more accomplished gentleman than the heir-apparent, for he speaks more refinedly of phrase, and indeed seldom indulges in scurrilous epithets, until provoked. Strong language is the result of his infirmity of nature, not of vicious inclination. Lord Castlereagh was not accounted the less a gentleman for using, as he _could_ do, very unsavory phrases occasionally. The Prince is the first to rail, while Sir John shows his breeding and, I will add, his reading, by quoting poetry. But, if he is poetical, still more is he philosophical. How gravely does he beseech Hal to trouble him no more with vanity! And what a censure does the heavy philosopher fling at the King’s son, when he tells the latter that he was hurt to hear the wise remarks of a lord of the council touching that son’s conduct! The fault of the knight is, that he is easily led away into evil; a common weakness with good-natured people. It is only since he held fellowship with the Prince, that the fat follower of the latter had become knowing in evil, and Heaven help him, little better, as he says, than one of the wicked. Nay, he has enough of orthodoxy left to elicit praise, even from the editor of the _Record_. “O, if a man were to be saved by merit,” he exclaims, “what hole in hell were hot enough to hold him!”