On the whole, I confess, I feel no temptation whatever to expatiate upon this portion of my hero’s rapidly closing career. The Windsor adventures of Sir John Falstaff, forming as they do the basis of one of the most admirably faithful and picturesque of Shakspeare’s historical studies, present, after all, but an exceptional and, in my opinion, most painful episode in the knight’s history. They show us the harrowing spectacle of a great man in his decline. Many thoughtless commentators have pronounced the portrait of Sir John Falstaff, as drawn in the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” to be wanting in verisimilitude, and have therefore called its authenticity into question. No discerning mind can mistake the likeness. It is the same man whom we have so often seen drawn by the same master-hand under more favourable circumstances--but how changed, how fallen! The features are all unmistakeably there; but the expression, bearing, and complexion, how sadly deteriorated! Age, disappointment, and suffering have done their work. Sir John can no longer hold his ground against the most contemptible adversary. The victor is vanquished--the biter bitten. The more than match for the keen-witted Harry Monmouth--the conqueror of Gascoigne and the terror of Poins--becomes the easy dupe of a couple of practical-joking Berkshire housewives. It is distressing to contemplate a man--whom we have seen cross swords with Douglas; capture Colevile of the Grange; and who, after all (as hath been demonstrated), there is strong reason to believe, was the actual slayer of the terrible Henry Percy--sunk so low as to receive without resentment a sound cudgelling administered, in a fit of insensate jealousy, by a _bourgeois_ inhabitant of Peascod Street, Windsor--who, for aught I can discover to the contrary, may have been a retired grocer. * It may be urged that Sir John Falstaff, in justice to his knightly standing, could not challenge an ignoble curmudgeon like Ford to mortal combat; and that he acted becomingly in preferring the more appropriate vengeance of keeping that citizen’s money--intrusted to him for an avowedly immoral purpose. This was all very well in its way, but did not wipe out the original outrage. That shameful business of the buck-basket, also, was an indignity to which Sir John in the heyday of his powers could never have submitted. “Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at him” with a vengeance, at this time, and the meanest are permitted to do so with impunity. His very retainers turn against him (always excepting the faithful Bardolph, who relieves his master, when under the pressure of pecuniary difficulties, of the cost of his maintenance, by turning tapster and waiting on the knight at another person’s expense). He is even braved by Pistol; and that “drawling, affecting rogue,” Nym, refuses to carry his messages. He is cajoled, hoaxed, bamboozled. He suffers himself to be “made an ass” in