So while Northumberland's castle is agitated by the news of disaster, and the slain Percy is expected home by the halls he never shall inherit, Falstaff appears, with that diminutive page who was Christian when the Prince gave him, "and look, if the fat villain have not transformed him ape." We were pitying Northumberland, as in grief and anger he threw away his crutch, tore the "sickly quoif" from the head which princes aimed to hit, and called for iron to encase his forehead. What does this fat man here, jeering at his page for being smaller than he, and asking what Master Dumbleton said about the satin for his short cloak and slops? It must have been a mistake of some precipitate scene-shifter. No: there be peers of the realm and peerless blackguards; one is in revolt against his king, the other against all decency. But the play has a history which includes them both in its epoch, as Nature includes them; and for her it is but a step from Warkworth, where the old nobleman is weeping, to London, where this tavern-haunter defies fortune with his shifty gibes, and laments nothing but the consumption of his purse. What stimulus can there be for us in his gilded rascality so soon after Harry Percy's spur is cold? Shall we put up with him? We shall have no trouble: Falstaff undertakes to vindicate Nature for setting him in this company, and he does it with such resource and admirable cheerfulness that earldoms seem to have been created to be his foil.
His character belongs to comedy because its vices are of the breed which never contract alliances with great passions. The big frame is so completely inoculated with laughter that his faults cannot take the contagion of tragedy. His wit is an implement which his comic nature uses for purposes of self-defence. He is essentially comic before he opens his mouth: for he is built to brag, and is too fat to be brave; his fleshly propensities are latent with situations for covering him with ridicule; his talent for lying has the peril that it may be used too often. Yet, on the whole, he is of Swift's opinion, that a lie is too good a thing to be wasted. But let the Prince and Poins plot a little, and the Wives of Windsor beguile his loose vein, and the scene quickly runs to his discomfiture. The mountainous knave is caught in a trap which might have been baited for a mouse, so small that we wonder how his wit could have blundered into it. But, being in, his wit behaves so delightfully like virtue that we think he has escaped. "Nothing confutes me but eyes," he says. Only seeing is disbelieving such an embodied stratagem. "By the Lord, I knew ye!" said he to the Prince, after the midnight scare the latter gave him, and goes nigh to convince us that he ran away to avoid killing the heir-apparent. So large a man does not often wriggle so unctuously through such a narrow place. We should have to make his bail bear some correspondence to his bulk, if he lived where swindling was a signal for juries to disagree.