I am aware that, in order to make good my position, I shall be required to prove that Ancient Pistol--a warrior not habitually remarkable for his excellence in any manly or athletic pursuits--did, in the course of a single day, accomplish a very rapid and daring act of horsemanship, calculated to tax the endurance of stronger thews and sinews than the worthy Ancient’s; being nothing less than the conveying to Master Shallow’s Gloucestershire--residence in the evening, tidings of an event that had taken place in London in the morning. But I trust I have sufficient powers of special pleading and aptitude for the historical business generally, to be enabled to get over far greater obstacles than are presented by this emergency. Pistol need not have ridden the whole distance himself. He might have been lying in wait for the expected tidings, which he was the means of conveying to Sir John Falstaff--let us say, somewhere between London and Oxford--whither the news of the event in question, namely, the death of the king, who expired on the 20th, would assuredly be conveyed post, immediately on its occurrence. A well-authenticated episode in the life of Ancient Pistol makes it more than probable that London, at about this time, was scarcely a safe residence for him. The gallant subaltern was in a temporary difficulty for having, with other warlike spirits, “beaten a man,” who would seem to have been left at the termination of the encounter in a precarious condition, inasmuch as, within a day or two of the occurrences immediately under notice, we find he had breathed his last in consequence of injuries he received on the occasion. * The provocation was doubtless great; in all probability, nothing less than an unpardonable insult to Mrs. Dorothea Tearsheet, in the presence of whom and of Mrs. Quickly the punishment appears to have been inflicted. When we remember that Pistol himself had been known (under the influence of vinous aberration, it is true) to speak slightingly of the former lady, and that he was by no means a man of strait-laced notions in the matter of respect for the sex generally, the outrage upon his patron’s friend and kinswoman * must have been great indeed to impel him to so terrible an act of vengeance. But the law is not accustomed to take cognizance of such honourably extenuating circumstances in cases of murderous assault, and it can scarcely be doubted that Pistol was, at this time, “keeping out of the way,”--by no means an unaccustomed manouvre to that distinguished professor of military stratagem. Whither could he fly for protection except to the sheltering wing of Sir John Falstaff? What tidings so likely to be anxiously awaited by him as those that would assure him of his patron’s greatness, with dispensing power over the laws of England? Depend upon it, Ancient Pistol, at the time of King Henry the Fourth’s death, was as far from London, and as near to Falstaff, as his circumstances would permit, and keenly on the watch.