It is needless to say that Sir John had no wish to be excused, but that he had come intentionally to stop. He had long had Master Robert Shallow “tempering between his finger and thumb,” and had now come to “seal with him.” He had, years ago, seen to the bottom of Justice Shallow. He knew that ornament to the magistracy to be nothing better than a time-serving humbug, and he had come, as I think most justifiably, to take any possible advantage of him. It was a breach of hospitality, if you will; but remember we are treating of great men and their motives. My only regret is that I am compelled to exhibit my hero, towards the end of his career, engaged in the pursuit of “such small deer” as a pitiful country justice. When I compare John Falstaff, in his sixty-seventh year, on this particular evening, stretching his limbs under Master Shallow’s oak (as yet the mahogany tree was an unnaturalised exotic), picking the short legs of Master Shallow’s roasted hens, and washing down as much of Master Shallow’s garrulous mendacity as limitless draughts of Master Shallow’s sack and Bordeaux might enable him--all the while meditating through what particular chink in Master Shallow’s vanity he could best get at the same gentleman’s purse-strings;--when I compare this with another picture presented on the preceding evening, by another great man of imperfect notions of _meum_ and _teum_, frequently mentioned in these pages, younger in years, but centuries older in depravity than Sir John, and with both feet already in the grave--legs, body, and all rapidly sliding in after them--Henry Bolingbroke on his death-bed, in short--counselling his young son and successor-- “to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels: that action hence borne out May waste the memory of the former days;” (that is, the days of his early rascality, the fruits of which he would have his son preserve by the fomentation of fresh villanies)--when I compare the conduct of these two waning celebrities, the one within half a dozen hours of death, the other with good two years and a quarter of life in him, (alas! no more,) I am more forcibly than ever reminded of my reluctantly formed suspicion, that the character of Sir John Falstaff may have been really deficient in the heroic element after all, and am made to feel that he comes out, by comparison with the more wholesale practitioner, in a pitifully moral and respectable light.