* Oldcastle was good enough to keep out of the way, in return for which considerate behaviour he was let off with a “grand cursing at St. Paul’s Cross.” He was captured four years later, and “roasted to death by a fire kindled under him” at Smithfield--the crown being then in better circumstances and able to defray the expenses of his prosecution. But of what use was the so-called liberty to Sir John Falstaff? It was, after all, but the liberty which you grant to a gudgeon when you unhook him from the end of your fishing line and toss him contemptuously into the nearest corn-field. Was not Sir John an exile from the court? Had not the idol of his misplaced affections, “his king, his Jove,” forbidden him admission to the Olympian circle, where nectar and ambrosia were alone to be found? Had not Henry the Fifth commanded him “Not to come near our person by ten mile?” He had indeed! And that cruel radius was a rigid bar at the end of which Sir John was ruthlessly chained ten miles aloof from all that was life, and warmth, and breath to him. It was the very mockery of mercy. It was like saying to a man, “I will only keep your mouth and nostrils ten inches below the surface of the water, but above that altitude you shall never rise.” Mighty like drowning after all! The present book, the last and saddest of our history! will be, of necessity, a short one. The public career of Sir John Falstaff may be said to have terminated with the catastrophe recorded in the last chapter. The remaining months of his existence he passed in retirement--would I could add in prosperity!--as a private gentleman. There is a completeness and consistency in the life of this remarkable man almost without parallel in history. He was born in difficulties; he lived sixty-three years in embarrassed circumstances; and died in hot water. And yet throughout the whole of this trying pilgrimage Sir John was never once tempted to depart from his guiding principles. What were Sir John Falstaff’s guiding principles? the inconsiderate reader may ask,--yielding to the popularly received opinion that the knight never had any, than which a greater mistake can scarcely be imagined. Who shall accuse of irregularity a man who, for upwards of three-score years, based his every act upon the rigid observance of two rules of life? These were, firstly, never to let his business interfere with his pleasure; secondly, on no occasion to suffer his income to exceed his expenditure; principles which, it will be admitted, Sir John adhered to in the teeth of no common or unfrequent temptations to their abandonment. It must not be supposed that Sir John Falstaff for a moment believed that King Henry the Fifth intended to fulfil his promise of allowing his banished associates a sufficiency for “competence of life” still less that his majesty, among his other “startling effects” of reformation, meditated keeping his word upon so delicate a matter. There