“I know thee not, old man! Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dreamed of such a kind of man, So surfeit swell’d, so old, and so profane; But, being awake, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body, hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandising; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men.” As one entertaining an excusable professional jealousy on behalf of the much-maligned and decidedly unprofitable calling of “fool and jester”--(which I was so injudicious as to take up with, very early in life, and have already an “ill-becoming” sprinkling of premature “white hairs” amongst my black ones, to show as a natural consequence of that error)--I dwell with malicious pleasure on the fact that, at this juncture of his homily, his no longer jocular majesty, Henry the Fifth, was suddenly “pulled up” by a reminder, on the countenance of his senior whom he had presumed to lecture, that he, the king, had unconsciously slipped back into his old habits, and, while reprimanding levity, had committed himself by making a joke upon Falstaff’s bulk, as in the jolly old days of the Boar’s Head fraternisation. In the words of an able commentator upon this historical passage:--“He saw the rising smile and smothered retort upon Falstaff’s lip, and he checks him with--‘Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.’” The very thing he was afraid of! He had rashly challenged old Jack with the knight’s own weapons, and was fain to plead benefit of royalty to sneak out of the combat in which he knew he must be worsted. To impose silence on his adversary was his only chance. He continued:-- “Presume not that I am the thing I was: For Heaven doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self, So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me; and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots; Till then, I banish thee on pain of death, As I have done the rest of my misleaders, _Not to come near our person by ten mile._ For competence of life I will allow you, That lack of means enforce you not to evil; And as we hear you do reform yourselves, We will, according to your strength and qualities, Give you advancement.--Be it your charge, my lord, To see perform’d the tenor of our word. Get on.”