not think it too soon at an end." A comedy that deserves such praise as this--which assuredly is not misplaced--need not be dismissed as a pot-boiler. Knight's conjecture that _The Merry Wives_ was written before the histories were written is a plausible conjecture, and perhaps worthy of some consideration. It is not easy to believe that Shakespeare, after he had created Falstaff and thoroughly drawn him, was capable of lessening the character and making it almost despicable with paltriness--as certainly it becomes in _The Merry Wives_. That is not the natural way of an artistic mind. But it is easier to credit the idea that the Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ was the first study of the character, although not first shown, which subsequently expanded into the magnificent humorous creation of the histories. Falstaff in the comedy is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled, victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women, who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous light or made more contemptible,--in a kindly, good-humoured way. The hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere seen the averted face of shocked propriety. The two wives are bent on a frolic, and they will merrily punish this presumptuous sensualist--this silly, conceited, gross fellow, "old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails." If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of him we should by no means treasure him as we do now; but it is through the histories that we learn to know and appreciate him, and it is of the man portrayed there that we always unconsciously think when, in his humiliating discomfiture, we hear him declare that "wit may be made a Jack-a-lent when 'tis upon ill employment." For the Falstaff of the histories is a man of intellect, wisdom, and humour, thoroughly experienced in the ways of the world, fascinating in his drollery, human, companionable, infinitely amusing, and capable of turning all life to the favour of enjoyment and laughter--a man who is passionate in the sentiment of comradeship, and who, with all his faults (and perhaps because of some of them, for faultless persons are too good for this world), inspires affection. "Would I were with him," cries the wretched Bardolph, "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." It is not Bardolph only whose heart has a warm corner for the memory of the poor old jovial sinner, wounded to death by the falling off of friendship--the implacable hardness of new-born virtue in the regenerated royal mind.