This was agreed upon, and the duke de- | body. All the wise men examined it. It parted. was not an orang-outang: it was not a chimpanzee; evidently it was a new species. Then a family conclave was called. What shall we call it?" asked everybody. The Duchess de Chimpanzee, who was languidly making mud pies, said,

"I know he won't live-he's too smart." The child recovered; and, as he lay on his back across her knees and surveyed the ceiling, she went on :

"Such a head! Why, every one who sees him says that he is going to be a Beecher. Do you notice that high forehead ?"

I did. I thought he was all forehead, as his hair didn't commence to grow until the back of his neck was reached; but she assured me that I was mistaken.

"Wouldn't I just heft him once?" I hefted him.

I told her that I never saw a child of his weight weigh so much, and she smiled like an angel. She said that she was afraid that I didn't appreciate children, but now she knew I did.

"Wouldn't I just look at his darling little feet-his little red feet and cunning toes?" Yes, I would.

She rolled him over on his face and unwound his feet and triumphantly held them up to my gaze. I contemplated the hundreds of little wrinkles running lengthwise and crosswise the big toes and the little toes, and I agreed with her that so far as I could judge from the feet and the toes and the wrinkles, a future of unexampled brilliancy lay before that pug-nosed infant.

He began to kick and howl, and she stood him on end, set him up, laid him down, and trotted him until she bounced his wind-colic into the middle of September.

"Whom did he look like?

I bent over the scarlet-faced rascal, pushed his nose one side, chucked him under the chin, and didn't answer without due deliberation. I told her that there was a faint resemblance to George Washington around the mouth, but the eyes reminded me of Daniel Webster, while the general features had made me think of the poet Milton ever since she entered the house.

That was just her view exactly, only she hadn't said anything about it before.

"Did I think he was too smart to live?"

I felt of his ears, rubbed his head, put my finger down the back of his neck, and I told her that in my humble opinion, he wasn't, though he had a narrow escape. If his nose had been set a little more to one side, or his ears had appeared in the place of his eyes, Bascom could have purchased a weed for his hat without delay. No; the child would live. There wasn't the least doubt of it; and any man or woman who said he wouldn't grow up to make the world thunder with

his fame would steal the wool off a lost lamb in January.

She felt so happy that she rolled the imp up in his forty-nine bandages, shook him to straighten his legs and to take the kinks out of his neck, and then carried him home under her arm, while my wife made me go along with an umbrella, for fear the sun would peel his little nose.

SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. [THE origin of this famous character has been much

discussed. Old chroniclers allege that Shakspeare had a

personal motive for introducing Falstaff into his plays. They state that there was an original to the character,

who, having incurred the Bard's displeasure, was in consequence thus devoted to an immortality of ridicule. But there is no good evidence to support such a theory. Sir John Fastolf, whom some have supposed to have suggested the character, died about a century before Shakspeare was born; and, moreover, he is introduced In his own proper name in the play of Henry VI. In the original draft of King Henry IV., Falstaff was called Sir John Oldcastle, but in compliance with the wishes of the descendants of a knight of that name, Shakspeare chose the now immortal name of Falstaff instead. In the Epilogue to the Second Part of Henry

IV. the poet says: "For anything I know, Falstaff

shall die of a sweat, unless he be already killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man."]

[In our treatment of this extract from Shakspeare, we have adopted the novel plan of presenting Falstaff as a MONOGRAPH. We keep him on the stage through all his Acts, as the prime figure; of course, preserving the text and character of those with whom he plays. We are thus enabled to give in a comparatively brief extract Shakspeare's Falstaff, EN

TIRE.

ter throughout three plays, and exhibited him in every variety of situation; the figure is drawn so definitely and individually, that even to the mere reader it conveys the clear impression of personal acquaintance. Falstaff is the most agreeable and entertaining knave that ever was portrayed.

"His contemptible qualities are not disguised: old, lecherous, and dissolute; corpulent beyond measure, and always intent upon cherishing his body with eating, drinking, and sleeping; constantly in debt, and anything but conscientious in his choice of means by which money is to be raised; a cowardly soldier, and a lying braggart; a a satirist behind their backs; and yet we are flatterer of his friends before their face, and never disgusted with him. We see that his tender care of himself is without any mixture of malice towards others; he will only not be disturbed in the pleasant repose of his sensuality, and this he obtains through the activity of his understanding. Always on the alert, and good-humored, ever ready to crack jokes on others, and to enter into those of which he is himself the subject, so that he justly boasts he is not only witty himself, but the cause of wit in others, he is an admirable companion for youthful idleness and levity. Under a helpless exterior, he conceals an extremely acute mind; he has always at command some dexterous turn whenever any of his free jokes begin to give displeasure; he is shrewd in his distinctions between those whose favor he has to win and those over whom he may assume a familiar authority. He is so convinced that the part which he plays can only pass under "Falstaff," says Dr. Johnson, "unimita- the cloak of wit, that even when alone he is ted, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe never altogether serious, but gives the drolthee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of lest coloring to his love-intrigues, his intersense which may be admired but not es- course with others, and to his own sensual teemed; of vice which may be despised, but philosophy. Witness his inimitable solilohardly detested! Falstaff... is a thief and quies on honor, on the influence of wine on a glutton, a coward and a boaster, always bravery, his descriptions of the beggarly vagready to cheat the weak and prey upon the abonds whom he enlisted, of Justice Shallow, poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the &c. Falstaff has about him a whole court of defenceless. At once obsequious and malig- amusing caricatures, who by turns make their nant, he satirizes in their absence those whom appearance, without ever throwing him into he lives by flattering . . . Yet the man thus the shade. The adventure, in which the corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself neces- Prince, under the disguise of a robber, comsary to the Prince that despises him, by the pels him to give up the spoil which he had most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gai-just taken; the scene where the two act the ety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy scapes and sallies of levity, which make sport, but raise no envy."

The Falstaff Letters, commencing on page 301, so admirably supplement Shakspeare's comic masterpiece (and as the book is very rare and costly) we have published them as addenda to Shakspeare's Falstaff.]

part of the King and the Prince; Falstaff's behaviour in the field, his mode of raising recruits, his patronage of Justice Shallow, which afterwards takes such an unfortunate turn-all this forms a series of characteristic Schlegel says: "Falstaff is the crown of scènes of the most original description, full Shakspeare's comic invention. He has, with- of pleasantry, and replete with nice and inout exhausting himself, continued this charac-genious observation, such as could only find

sent."

a place in a historical play like the pre-mous Victories," etc., Mr. RICHARD GRANT WHITE observes: 46 When Henry V. says, "The whole range of imaginative literature My lads, if the olde King my father were (says ROBERT B. BROUGH in his "Life of Sir dead, we would all be kings,' Oldcastle reJohn Falstaff, Longman's, 1857,) affords no plies, He is a good olde man, God take him instance of a fictitious personage ranking, al- to his mercie the sooner.' In degree, the most inseparably, in the public faith with the wit of this answer is as unlike Falstaff's best characters of actual history, parallel to that of sallies as the spark of a leyden jar, that can the inimitable Falstaff of Shakspeare . . . The hardly be perceived in a dark room, is unlike peculiar association of Falstaff with events the playful flashes of heat-lightning that ilthat are known to have occurred, and person-luminate all the heavens with their harmless ages who are known to have lived—added to blaze; but in kind it is purely Falstaffian. the fact that his character has been developed Its easy impudence, its light and careless to greater length and with more apparent fondness than the poet was wont to indulge in, make it a matter of positive difficulty to disbelieve that Falstaff actually lived and influenced the age he is assumed to have belonged to, as much as to doubt that Henry V. conquered at Agincourt, that Hotspur was irascible, and Glendower conceited."

"I firmly believe," says HORACE WALPOLE, "that fifty Iliads and Æneids could be written sooner than such a character as Falstaff' s."

treatment of a serious subject, its jocular masking of an utter and inherent selfishness, its delicious non sequitur which yet seems a sequitur, its 'manner of wrenching a true cause the false way,' are the characteristic traits of the fat knight's humor: and I have little doubt that this single line is the germ which, impregnated, unconsciously perhaps, by Shakspeare's life-giving genius, became, in its final development, the most mirthful creation of all imaginative literature."

REV. H. N. HUDSON, A. M., one of the foremost Shakspearean critics and editors, says: "Falstaff is a very impracticable subject for criticism to deal with; his character being more complex and manifold than can well be digested into the forms of logical statement. One of the wittiest of men, yet he is not a wit; one of the most sensual of men, still he cannot with strict justice be called a sensualist; he has a quick, strong sense of danger and a lively regard to his own safety, a peculiar vein, indeed, of cowardice, or something very like it, yet he is not a coward; he lies and brags prodigiously, still he is not a liar nor a braggart. No such general terms applied to

"Falstaff," says THOMAS KENNY, in his Life and Genius of Shakspeare, "is universally regarded as the poet's largest and most effective comic creation. It may be that elsewhere he has now and then presented the whimsical and incongruous side of life with a more subtle fancy, with a deeper truthfulness, with a finer harmony, with a more purely creative insight; but nowhere else has he evoked the genius of unrestrained merriment with such broad effect, and such apparently inexhaustible variety. We are not by any means prepared to maintain that Falstaff is his greatest production, but it seems to be the one that stands out most alone and indepen-him can do otherwise than mislead, causing dent, with nothing equal to it, or even like it, in his own or any other drama. By some happy accident, or it may be by some native instinct, he here found, for once, a figure definite enough to form a clear and unmistakable reality, and yet wide enough to admit of the play of the most unrestrained humor; and he has prodigally lavished upon it all the resources of his fancy. . We all readily yield to the contagious influence of its riotous drollery, and willingly forget that in its unrestrained abandonment to the genius of merriment, it makes no pretension to the representation of an ideal grace, or truthfulness, or harmony."

us to think we understand him, when we do not.

"If we were to fix upon anything as especially characteristic of Falstaff we should say it is an amazing fund of good sense. His vast stock of this, to be sure, is pretty much all enlisted or impressed into the service of sensuality, yet nowise so but that the servant still overpeers and outshines the master. Moreover, his thinking has such agility and quickness as to do the work of the most prompt and popping wit, yet in such sort as we cannot but feel the presence of something much larger and stronger than wit. mere wit, be it never so good, to be keenly An old drama, of unknown authorship, en- relished, must be sparingly used, and the titled The Famous Victories of King Henry more it tickles the sooner it tires. But no Fifth, is thought by some writers to have sug- one can ever be weary of Falstaff's talk who gested to Shakspeare his plays of King Henry understands it, his speech being like pure, the Fourth (Parts I and II.), and King Henry fresh cold water which always tastes good be the Fifth. Referring to the play, "The Fa-cause it is-tasteless..

For

"The proud consciousness of his resources was then unheard of, Jack Falstaff is known it is, no doubt, that keeps him so perpetually as familiarly as he was to the wonderful at his ease; and hence, in part, the ineffable court of princes, beggars, judges, swindlers, charm of his conversation Hence it is heroes, bullies, gentlemen, scoundrels, jusalso that he so often lets go all regard to pru- tices, thieves, knights, tapsters and the rest dence of speech, and thrusts himself into the whom he drew about him. It is indeed his tightest places and narrowest predicaments, court. He is lord paramount, the suzerain as fit opportunities of exercising and evincing to whom all pay homage." his incomparable fertility and alertness of thought; being quite assured that he shall still come off uncornered and uncaught, and that the greater his seeming perplexity, the greater will be his triumph... And thus throughout, no exigency turns up but that he is ready with a word that exactly fits into and fills the place; and he always lets on and shuts off the jest precisely when and how will produce the best effect.

66

Falstaff is altogether the greatest triumph of the Comic Muse that the world has to show. In this judgment I believe that all who have fairly conversed with the irresistible old sinner are agreed. . . The scene where Falstaff personates the King, to examine the Prince upon the particulars of his life, is probably the choicest issue of comic preparation that genius has ever bequeathed to human enjoyment."

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE pronounces Falstaff " Shakspeare's unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece in the school of comic art and humoristic nature."

In MAURICE MORGANN's remarkable essay on The Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, (1777), occur these observations: "It cannot escape the reader's notice that he [Falstaff] is a character made up by Shakspeare totally of incongruities;-a man at once young and old, enterprising and fat, a dupe and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly in appearance and brave in reality, a knave without malice, a liar without deceit, and a knight, a gentleman, and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honor. This is a character which, though it may be decompounded, could not, I believe, have been formed, nor the ingredients of it duly mingled, upon any receipt whatever; it required the hand of Shakspeare himself to give to every particular part a relish of the whole, and of the whole to every particular part; alike the same incongruous, identical Falstaff, whether to the grave chief-justice he vainly talks of his youth and offers to caper for a thousand, or cries to Mrs. Doll, I am old! I am old!' although she is seated on his lap, and he is courting her for busses. How Shakspeare could furnish out sentiment of so extraordinary a composition, and supply it with such

WILLIAM WATKISS LLOYD, M. R. S. L., in his Introduction to King Henry IV., thus testifies: "It has been said that Falstaff is the summit of Shakspeare's comic invention,' and we may consequently add, the most in-appropriate and characteristic language, huimitable comic character ever delineated; for who could invent like Shakspeare? Falstaff is now to us hardly a creature of the imagination; he is so definitely and distinctly drawn that the mere reader of these dramas has the complete impression of a personal acquaintance. He is surrounded by a group of comic personages from time to time, each of which would have been sufficient to throw any ordinary creation into the shade, but they only serve to make the super-eminent humor of the Knight doubly conspicuous."

WILLIAM MAGINN, LL.D., pays the following tribute: "Jack Falstaff to my familiars! By that name, therefore, must he be known by all persons, for all are now the familiars of Falstaff. The title of Sir John Falstaff to all Europe,' is but secondary and parochial. He has long since far exceeded the limit by which he bounded the knowledge of his knighthood; and in wide-spreading territories, which in the day of his creation were untrodden by human foot, and in teeming realms where the very name of England

mor and wit, I cannot tell; but I may, however, venture to infer, and that confidently, that he who so well understood the uses of incongruity, and that laughter was to be raised by the opposition of qualities in the same man, and not by their agreement or conformity, would never have attempted to raise mirth by shewing us cowardice in a coward unattended by pretence, and softened by every excuse of age, corpulence and infirmity: and of this we cannot have a more striking proof than his furnishing this very character. on one instance of real terror, however excusable, with boast, braggadocio and pretence, exceeding that of all other stage cowards, the whole length of his superior wit, humor and invention."

G. C. VERPLANCK, editor of The Illustrated Shakspeare, says of Falstaff: He is the most original as well as the most real of all comic creations-a character of which many traits and peculiarities must have been gleaned, as their air of reality testifies, from the observation of actual life; and yet, with