Of the violence of the shock between the conflicting armies, one circumstance alone is sufficient corroboration. Sir John Falstaff, emulating his royal chieftain, also “exposed his person in the thickest of the fight”--nay, may very reasonably be asserted to have been “the thickest of the fight himself.” We will not pause to dwell upon the magnitude of risk incurred by Sir John--much greater in proportion to his bulk than that of the slender and dyspeptic monarch--in exposing so vast a target to the arrows of the enemy. Our knight’s heroic achievements are too numerous to need any stress to be laid on one solitary instance. Suffice it, that Sir John, at an early stage of the battle, conducted his troops to a position of the greatest danger, where they perished almost to a man. In his own light-hearted words, uttered amidst the most terrible carnage and peril, “he led his ragamuffins where they were peppered!” “There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive!” said Sir John, wiping his brow, that was clotted with dust and blood, “and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.” And with this historic fact staring them in the face, there are not wanting people to pronounce Sir John Falstaff a coward! Well, well! Sir John himself has told us what the world is given to! The heroism of the Douglas and his gallant Scots has not been exaggerated by their compatriot historian, in whom exaggeration on the subject might well be pardoned. Those intrepid warriors--their movements, for the most part, unencumbered with nether garments--performed prodigies of valour and ubiquity. It was said of the field of Shrewsbury in the fifteenth, as of the four quarters of the globe in the nineteenth century, “You found Scotchmen everywhere!”