Page:An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777).djvu/36

Rh mind, which had enabled him to pass thro’ this course with ease to himself and delight to others; and thus, at last, mixing youth and age, enterprize and corpulency; wit and folly, poverty and expence, title and buffoonery, innocence as to purpose, and wickedness as to practice; neither incurring hatred by bad principle, or contempt by Cowardice, yet involved in circumstances productive of imputation in both; a butt and a wit, a humourist and a man of humour, a touchstone and a laughing stock, a jester and a jest, has Sir John Falstaff, taken at that period of his life in which we see him, become the most perfect Comic character that perhaps ever was exhibited.

It may not possibly be wholly amiss to remark, in this place, that if Sir John Falstaff had possessed any of that Cardinal quality, Prudence, alike the guardian of virtue and the protector of vice; that quality, from the possession or the absence of which, the character and fate of men in this life take, I think, their colour, and not from real vice or virtue; if he had considered his wit not as principal but accessary only; as the instrument of