The character of old Falstaff, even with all his faults, gives me more consolation than the most studied efforts of wisdom: I here behold an agreeable old fellow, forgetting age, and showing me the way to be young at sixty-five. Sure I am well able to be as merry, though not so comical, as he. Is it not in my power to have, though not so much wit, at least as much vivacity?—Age, care, wisdom, reflection, begone!—I give you to the winds. Let’s have t’other bottle: here’s to the memory of Shakespeare, Falstaff, and all the merry men of Eastcheap. Such were the reflections that naturally arose while I sat at the Boar’s-head tavern, still kept at Eastcheap. Here, by a pleasant fire, in the very room where old Sir John Falstaff cracked his jokes, in the very chair which was sometimes honoured by Prince Henry, and sometimes polluted by his immoral merry companions, I sat and ruminated on the follies of youth; wished to be young again; but was resolved to make the best of life while it lasted, and now and then compared past and present times together. “A Reverie at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap.” _Collected Essays_, 1765. GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON, 1765 (1709-1773) “_Boileau—Pope._” BOILEAU . . . The office of an _editor_ was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would anybody think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture? POPE The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the honour of Shakespeare: and if you knew all his beauties as well as I, you would not wonder at this zeal. No other author had ever so copious, so bold, so _creative_ an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know _what man was_ from those writings. BOILEAU You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I cannot deny that he did so; but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together, in the composition of his pictures, as he has frequently done. POPE The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy, and farce in the same play, nay, sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite inexcusable. But this was the taste of the times when Shakespeare wrote. BOILEAU A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the taste of his contemporaries. POPE