Colevile. I am a knight, sir, and my name is, Colevile of the Dale. Falstaff. Well then, Colevile, is your name; a knight, is your degree; and your place, the dale. Colevile, shall still be your name; a traitor, your degree; and the dungeon, your place--a place deep enough. So shall you be still Colevile of the Dale. Colevile. Are you not Sir John Falstaff? Falstaff. As good a man as he, sir, whoe’er I am. **** Colevile. I think you are Sir John Falstaff, and I yield me. This capture of Colevile (which, considering Colevile’s alacrity to be caught, I don’t well see how Sir John could have avoided), is, I am happy to say, the only evidence on record, of our knight’s having been in the slightest degree mixed up with this most rascally transaction in the most rascally age of English history: perpetrated in the name, and by the son and officers, of a distinguished rascal, who, by his own vast demerits, had raised himself to the exalted position of the King of all the Rascals in England. Sir John’s remarkable abnegation of self in this affair, almost induces me to reconsider my by no means hastily formed estimate of his entire character. I begin to doubt seriously that Sir John Falstaff was one bit of a courtier after all. Had he been a person of that description, he would certainly have toadied King Henry the Fourth much better than he did, by aping (as is the fashion with people of a courtly turn) the most salient points of that lugubrious, and especially infamous, monarch’s character and conduct. This is a new light on the mystery of our knight’s repeated failures in the attempt to rise in court favour. He was not half a rogue--that is the long and short of the matter. And King Henry the Fourth, of unblessed memory, who had murdered his first cousin, who had stolen his first cousin’s wife’s jewels and embroidered petticoats,--who was capable of every crime, from pitch and toss with loaded farthings to manslaughter with arsenicated preparations,--felt for him much of that contempt which a six-bottle squire of the old school cannot but feel for a modern milksop, detected in the effeminate act of putting water in his tumbler of sherry. VII. DOUBTS ON THE GENIUS AND TESTIMONY OF SHAKSPEARE. LETTER FROM MASTER RICHARD WHITTINGTON.--AND OTHER MATTERS.