Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/142

 boy recalls his fanciful notion that a flea sticking upon Bardolph's nose was a black soul burning in hell. A specimen worthy of Falstaff is found in an ancient Greek epigram which celebrates a nose so long that the owner could never hear himself sneeze. But Falstaff's imagination is so prolific that we feel as if a great many of these comments on the text of Bardolph's nose had not come down to us.

But the talent itself has descended; and Falstaff may be regarded as the mighty progenitor of the American knack at exaggerating, into which imagination must enter either to make it witty or simply ludicrous. We can match the felicities of Falstaff from every State of the Union. Indeed, we are of opinion that emigration, which has impaired the physical fulness of the Anglo-Saxon man, has not depleted the vein of his humor: our romancing talent is as vast as the country which nourishes it by all enterprises and ambitions. We have not fallen away vilely; we do not bate, do not dwindle. Mr. Dickens declares that even the national habit of expectoration is on the scale of the country's streams. He is a genuine descendant of Falstaff, and he must have always lived at Gad's Hill, where, at some time or other, he helped the Prince and Poins to rob the fat knight, and outwitted all his accomplices by taking imagination for his best share of the booty. So we are not much surprised to hear him describe a high wind with the amplitude of Falstaff's girth: "The air was for some hours darkened with a shower of black hats, which are supposed to have been blown off the heads of unwary