Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/151

 *ure of kings and titled men to be suddenly forgetful of the humanness which generally makes a man ineligible to office; so that the kingship was a charter from Providence to give Falstaff his first sneap of retribution. None the less do we sympathize with him rather than with the King, because we are all prodigals out of office.

But notice the art of Shakspeare in this, that, if the King had broken with his old pal in such a way as not to hurt our feelings, we should not have been so well prepared to sympathize with the manner of his death. When that hour comes, we feel the full effect of Humor in the unwillingness to let our knowledge of his grossness and knavery break the legacy of his geniality. It sets in again, to take him off, "at the turning o' the tide." Dame Quickly, Bardolph, and the rest, cannot prevent reminiscences of his wit from seasoning their tears. Her story of his end, with its delicious inconsequence, cannot blunt the thrust we feel when he plays with flowers and babbles of green fields; and it suddenly occurs to us that the battered old sinner had once listened to the birds in the hedge-rows, and climbed summer trees to explore their nests. This bloated breather of tavern fumes had expanded a boy's glad lungs on the English hillsides, and shared the landscape's innocence. It just saves us from damning him, and we shift elsewhere the responsibility of doing that, though we are not prepared to go as far as Bardolph, who says he would like to be with him "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." "Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's