"Falstaff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an enormous pipe in his mouth, surrounded by large and small bottles of all sorts [entoure de chopes et bouteilles de toutes provenances]. His rather large head, his highly- coloured cheeks, his heavy features gave a Falstaff-like appearance to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... old gentleman was coming down over the bank, followed by about eight men bearing the four quarters of an old mare. The butler was very fat; and the proud consciousness of having done his duty, and met his master's wishes in a very difficult and important point, had made him a perfect Falstaff. He marshalled his men in front of the cooking-boat, and then came towards his master, who for some time stood amazed, and unable to speak. At last he roared out, 'And what the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... read this passage, and marvelled how Lever knew certain things that he tells. He learned this, and much more, the humours of war, from the original of Major Monsoon. Falstaff is alone in the literature of the world, but if ever there came a later Falstaff, Monsoon was the man. And where have you such an Irish Sancho Panza as Micky Free, that independent minstrel, or such an Irish Di Vernon as Baby Blake? The critics may praise Lever's thoughtful and ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... the people, and the democrats, having got you where Tommy had the wedge, intend to hold you there. Again you say that Mrs. Cady Stanton was three days in advance of you in the border towns, calling you the Sir John Falstaff of the campaign. I am under the impression, General, that these strong minded woman's rights women are more than three days in advance of you. (Loud cheers.) Falstaff was a jolly old brick, chivalrous and full of gallantry, and were he stumping ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than they deserved: but it is almost certain that Shakspeare, though not intending Falstaff as a portrait of Oldcastle, thought of him as he was designing the character; and it is altogether certain that by the London public Falstaff was supposed to represent Oldcastle. We can hardly suppose that such an expression as "my old lad of the castle," should ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... place. He was one of those very large and dark Frenchmen, a type not common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian Frenchman, huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was a sort of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but English. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, this Frenchman was rather solemn ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... conceived? And it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... at the outset for the distinction of leading the party, would now have gladly made an inglorious retreat rearward, to escape the contusions, or something worse, with which they were momentarily threatened; convinced, with Falstaff, that "honour ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... become the brain and feelings of his creations; and thus only does his Lear say with such perfect naturalness, "Pray you, undo this button." Hence, too, all the distinctness of character in his lifelike men and women, be it Hamlet or Falstaff, Cordelia or ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... them. They confine themselves to one range of characters, he shows a versatility of talent, and goes through a variety which it requires some genius to conceive, as well as mere talent at imitation. His Falstaff—though we cannot concede it to be exactly the character drawn by Shakspeare—is the best delineation in its way given by any actor now on the stage, and his Monsieur Mallet is in all ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... respect is as remarkable as in any other. In the First Part he displays a great natural gift of lying. His lies are not of the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in; like Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they are simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in the service of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as we see when he comes to palm off ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... foot, to witness one of these parades; for I believe that all the annals of the burlesque do not furnish a more amusing caricature of the "pomp and circumstance" of war. Compared to one of those militia regiments, Falstaff's famous corps, whose appearance was so unmilitary as to prevent even that liberal-minded gentleman from marching through Coventry in their company, was a model of elegance and discipline. Sedeno's cavalry in the South American wars, though their uniform consisted only of "leggings," a pair ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... for injustice. We may compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half a hundred voters at some subsequent election: and if Thoreau had possessed as great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had counted a party however small, if his example had been followed by a hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnesses ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is the oldest and most persistent species of comedy in the language. None the less, Jonson's comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which comedy long continued to run. To mention only Shakespeare's Falstaff and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in "Henry IV." or in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," all are conceived in the spirit of humours. So are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... the date of the original introduction of this word into our vocabulary in either of the senses in which it is equivocally used by Falstaff in 1 Henry IV., Act. V. Sc. 3.? In the sense of fire-arms, pistols seem to have been unknown by that name as late as the year 1541; for the stat. 33 Hen. VIII. c. 6., after reciting the murders, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... just.' Johnson's criticism is true. There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day. He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior under ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... Steeled knights of the Conquest, bearded statesmen of Queen Elizabeth, and high-ruffled ladies of her court, were mingled with characters of comedy, such as a party-colored Merry Andrew, jingling his cap and bells; a Falstaff, almost as provocative of laughter as his prototype; and a Don Quixote, with a bean pole for a lance, and a pot lid for ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... and the morning crow of cocks; the time seemed interminable; but when daylight came, I landed, and found a pair of scarlet trousers pacing on their beat before every house in the village, and a small squad of prisoners, stunted and forlorn as Falstaff's ragged regiment, already hi hand. I observed with delight the good demeanor of my men towards these forlorn Anglo-Saxons, and towards the more tumultuous women. Even one soldier, who threatened to throw an old ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... respective lives, and for a few years after, and theirs, like her own productions, are little known to readers of this age, though it appears that she hoped her works would be read for a long time after her death. She wrote, “If my poems are of that common order which have, as Falstaff says, a natural alacrity in sinking, the praise of hireling and nameless critics would not keep them above the gulf of oblivion. If, on the contrary, they possess the buoyant property of true poetry, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... career was by no means brilliant, but characteristic. He was the fun-maker of the house, and, like Falstaff, could boast that he was not only witty himself, but the cause of wit in others. His stories were irresistibly comic; but they almost always contained expressions of profanity or coarseness which renders it impossible for us to transmit ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... was skinning the fox his sharp knife almost sacrificed one of the TWO ears imperatively required by the statute, in order that the wily hunter may not be tempted to present one ear at a time, thus multiplying red foxes and premiums therefor like Falstaff's "rogues in buckram." ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... than the former; but I have no fear of failing to make it out. In one sense, no doubt, Shakespere is unequal—as life is. He is not always at the tragic heights of Othello and Hamlet, at the comic raptures of Falstaff and Sir Toby, at the romantic ecstasies of Romeo and Titania. Neither is life. But he is always—and this is the extraordinary and almost inexplicable difference, not merely between him and all his contemporaries, but between him and all other writers—at ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... household hardly any trouble or expense. It brings people together in the easiest possible way, for ten minutes or an hour, just as their engagements or fancies may settle it. A cup of tea at the right moment does for the virtuous reveller all that Falstaff claims for a good sherris-sack, or at least the first half of its "twofold operation:" "It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... deep: will that humour pass?] I see not what relation the anchor has to translation. Perhaps we may read, the author is deep; or perhaps the line is out of its place, and should be inserted lower after Falstaff ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... and leopards, and I preferred to go into wild districts under the French flag to any flag. I am still thinking about taking that voyage, but I'll not march through Coventry with the crew we had down the Rembwe— that's flat, as Sir John Falstaff says. Picture to yourselves, my friends, the charming situation of being up a river surrounded by rapacious savages with a lot of valuable goods in a canoe and with only a crew to defend them possessed of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... creditable society in London. We think of Swift, in an earlier period of the century, enclosing to Stella some recklessly gross verses of his own upon Bolingbroke, and habitually writing to fine ladies in a way that Falstaff might have thought too bad for Doll Tearsheet. In saying that these coarse impurities are only points of manners, we are as far as possible from meaning that they are on that account unimportant. But it is childish to waste our time in censorious ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... a cool and shady retreat from the mid-day sun, and they may be seen in single file by scores, at the approach of an intruding footstep, scrambling up the pipe. Dying in this way, affects these creatures, as "sighing and grief" did Falstaff, "blows them up like a bladder;" and, like Sampson, they do more mischief in their death, than in all their life together. They swell up, and stop the water entirely, or partially dam it, so that the effect of the work ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... be frightened: you are richer as well as younger; and, no doubt, will have your chance first, my dear; and in the meantime, I dare say, those verses, like Falstaff's billet-doux, you know, are doing ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... nigh in—not properly born till flood." The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent. Shakespeare must have been familiar with it, for he makes Falstaff die "even just between twelve and one, e'en at the turning o' the tide." We meet the belief again on the Pacific coast of North America among the Haidas. Whenever a good Haida is about to die he sees ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... been holden, many plans proposed; but as the result of all these consultations and plans is to send a certain number to the frontiers, the suffrages have never been unanimous except in giving their negative.— Like Falstaff's troops, every one has some good cause of exemption; and if you were to attend a meeting where this affair is discussed, you would conclude the French to be more physically miserable than any people on the glove. Youths, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... groans the dagger'd sound, "despair and die." And hapless Juliet's unextinguish'd flame, Gives to the tomb she mock'd, her beauteous frame; Yet diff'rent far, where Claudio sees return'd To life, and love, the maid too rashly spurn'd; Or Falstaff, in his sympathetic scroll, Forth to the Wives of Windsor pours his soul. Again, forsaking mirth's fantastic rites, The Muse to follow, through her nobler flights, Where Milton paints angelic hosts in arms, And Heaven's ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... eliminated from the problem, if measures had been seasonably taken; but they now became critical elements in the decision to be made. And Hooker, despite his well-earned reputation as a fighting man, was unable to arrive at any other than the conclusion which Falstaff so cautiously enunciated, from beneath his shield, at the battle of Shrewsbury, that "the better part ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man is the paragon of animals, only to him he seems a quintessence ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... sowldior hurted in the quenes servyce in yrland having a lisens." The town could make merry at times, as we find when sixpence was paid "for a pynte of Secke when our burgesse Mr. Harrys was chosen"—which is very moderate compared with Falstaff's payments for the same liquor. In 1626 we read that special harbour-dues were levied to pay for the repair of the "peere or Kay of St. Ives"; in which dues there were special charges for English vessels and somewhat higher for "Alients." The writer is of divided ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... survival of the time when the depredations of highwaymen upon "pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings and traders riding to London with fat purses" gave to this spot the ill repute it had in Shakespeare's day; it was here he located Falstaff's great exploit. The tuft of evergreens which crowns the hill about Dickens' retreat is the remnant of thick woods once closely bordering the highway, in which the "men in buckram" lay concealed, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... are Stated in a note to allude to Walpole. See also, first Dialogue, where Chatturton is called, "That varlet bright." The note to which passage is "'I am the veriest varlet that ever chew'd,' says Falstaff, in Henry IV. Part 1. Act. 2. Mr. Horace Walpole, now Lord Orford, did not, however, seem to think it necessary that this varlet Chatterton should chew at all. See the Starvation ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the herb grows, and where he himself and a dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one-and-twenty weeks known no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This again was tolerably "steep" even for this Falstaff-like braggart. He continues with more bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb—virtues which were then very firmly and widely believed in—and is replied to by Cob, the anti-tobacconist, who, with equal exaggeration ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... a stately old place enough. It had been built in the days of Queen Bess; and was just such a house as that in which Justice Shallow might have entertained Falstaff—a long grey building with a porch in the centre and a huge gable at either end—a house with deep-mullioned windows ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... knife, or Highland sword, Your words have hewn and hack'd me; Whilst Quin, a rebel to his lord, Like his own Falstaff ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... ends, and was utterly regardless of means. He was ceaselessly putting up jobs to promote the cause he advocated, and to break down that of the antagonists. With the courage of Babadil he had the honesty of Ancient Pistol, the habits of Falstaff, and the temptations of Anthony would have been to him as pastures green to the hungering herd. Poor old Reub, his incarceration in the Vigilance cells nearly frightened the life out of him, and his release even under banishment, was as the open door to the caged wild bird. He never did ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... whites into a species of labor competition in the same branch of industry as the blacks, because the only branch open to all, can hardly have a self-respect-inspiring influence on that portion of the community, but should in its results rather illustrate old Falstaff's remark,—that "there is a thing often heard of, and it is known to many in our land, by the name of pitch; this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile: so doth the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... Samuel Johnson: Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1765. Richard Farmer: An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare: Addressed to Joseph Cradock, Esq. 1767. Maurice Morgann: An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. 1777. Notes. Nicholas Rowe. John Dennis. Alexander Pope. Lewis Theobald. Sir Thomas Hanmer. William Warburton. Samuel Johnson. Richard Farmer. Maurice ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... agilita, the performance of modern music is laboured and heavy; that of the classics, impossible. In fact, virtuosity, if properly understood, is as indispensable to-day as ever it was. As much vocal virtuosity is required to interpret successfully the music of Falstaff, in Verdi's opera, as is necessary for Maometto Secondo or Semiramide by Rossini. It is simply another form of virtuosity; that is all. The lyric grace or dramatic intensity of many pages of Wagner's music-dramas can be fully revealed only through a voice that has been rendered ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... away in plain sight or be carried off, either by stage hands, or, as part of the action, by other characters in the play. This latter device was sometimes adopted at considerable violence to probability, as when Shakspere makes Falstaff bear away Hotspur, and Hamlet, Polonius. Likewise, while the medieval habit of elaborate costuming was continued, there was every reason for adhering to the medieval simplicity of scenery. A single potted tree might symbolize a forest, and houses and caverns, with a great deal ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... that an emergency had arisen—such an emergency as will cast lustre upon British arms to the end of time. But that strange things were happening ahead he knew full well, for his new unit was as oddly made up as Falstaff's army: gunners, cooks, and A.S.C. drivers were all lumped together to make a company. Some carried their rifles at the slope and some at the trail, some had bayonets and some had not, certain details from ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... a son named Edward, whom he had carefully instructed in the art for which he himself was so famous. This Edward had a grandson, who served as a volunteer under the famous Sir John Falstaff, and by his gallant demeanour so recommended himself to his captain, that he would have certainly been promoted by him, had Harry the fifth kept his word with his ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... not badly carried out; Prince Henry, when he did not giggle, acted beautifully; and Falstaff really did very well, though his eyes were often directed downwards, and the curious, by standing on tiptoe, obtained not only a view of Prince Hal's pink petticoat, but of a great Shakespeare laid open on the floor; and a very low ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... development. The boundless world breaks in upon him with creative force. His sympathy is universal, and therefore so is his interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... infirmity approaches death the intellectual faculties are dimmed, his senses become less and less, and as he loses these he goes back to his old superstition. Old age brings back the memories of childhood. And the great bard gave in the corrupt and besotted Falstaff—who prattled of babbling brooks and green fields—an instance of the retracing steps taken by the memory at the last gasp. It has been said that the bible was sanctified by our mothers. Every superstition in the world, from ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... sharp touchings and spirited reliefs of these embellishments of life, and has worn down society into a more smooth and polished, but certainly a less characteristic surface. Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and, like the sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators. They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously: times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest materials, and ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... here. All things are seemingly native to him; for he is never at a loss. Not words, thoughts, dreams, images, music, fail him for a moment even. Who found him feeling for a word? Did we not find them ready at his hand as Ariel was ready to serve Prospero? Lear, Prospero, Brutus, Cassius, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, Hamlet, are as crowning creations as Cleopatra, Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Katharine the Shrew, Imogen, or Cordelia. We know not which to choose, as one who looks through a mountain vista to the sea, declaring each view fairer than the last, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... heard. Apparently 'twas enough that I was of their race and class, for when during a pause I slipped in my word of soothing explanation the uncorked vials of her rage showered down on me. Faith, I began to think that old Jack Falstaff had the right of it in his rating of discretion, and the maid appearing at that moment I showed a clean pair of heels and left her alone with ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Fair—the great triumph of modern fiction—is Becky Sharp: a character which will ever stand in the very foremost rank of English literature, if not with Falstaff and Shylock, then with Squire Western, Uncle Toby, Mr. Primrose, Jonathan Oldbuck, and Sam Weller. There is no character in the whole range of literature which has been worked out with more elaborate completeness. She is drawn from girlhood to old age, under every conceivable condition, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... that ever was believed! Who are pictures of everything that ever was believed!" I read that and I slapped my knees and I lay back and laughed like a very Falstaff. "Pictures of everything that ever was believed!" Ho, ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Shakespeare, and these are said to be the earliest notices of it in English literature. Thus in Troilus and Cressida: 'The devil luxury, with his fat rump, and potato finger, tickles these together!' In the Merry Wives, Falstaff says: 'Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the time of Green Sleeves; ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... to comfort him,"' I followed, quoting Mrs Quickly concerning Sir John Falstaff, '"bid him, 'a should not think of God: I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... fancy, and imagination, built up an outward world from the stores within his mind, as the bee finds a hive from a thousand sweets gathered from a thousand flowers. He was not only a great poet but a great philosopher. Richard III., Iago, and Falstaff are men who reverse the order of things, who place intellect at the head, whereas it ought to follow, like Geometry, to prove and to confirm. No man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive; ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... been said about this most remarkable personage. He has been fathered upon the Cingar of Folengo, which is too much of a compliment to that creation of the great Macaronic, and Falstaff has been fathered upon him, which is distinctly unfair to Falstaff. Sir John has absolutely nothing of the ill-nature which characterises both Cingar and Panurge; and Panurge is an actual and contemptible ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father had something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... proportion to one that is private and personal. The humorist refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he stamps it on whatever comes from him. "If reasons were as plenty as blackberries," says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of odd picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to the delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper than phrases: Falstaff ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... the cedar trees where we had been but a short time before. We stopped to inquire at a roadside inn which, among the multitude of such places, we had hardly noticed before, and which bore the legend, "The Sir John Falstaff," a distinction earned by being the identical place where Shakespeare located some of the pranks of his ridiculous hero. The inn-keeper was well posted on the literary traditions of the locality. "Yes," said he, "this is Gad's Hill Place, where Dickens ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... whose banner proclaimed his faith in Stowe and Seward and Parker, an aboriginal from the prairies, an ancient minstrel with a modern fiddle, and a modern minstrel with an ancient hurdy- gurdy. All these and more. Each man was a study in himself, and to all, Falstaff's description of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... poacher and in the poacher's creation of Mr. Justice Shallow of Gloucestershire, whose foolishness, suggested in "Henry IV." (Part II., Act iii. sc. 2), is still further emphasised in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," where he figures as one who has come to make a Star Chamber matter out of Sir John Falstaff's poaching. His complaint will be remembered. "Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge ... the council shall ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Mrs. Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she "knew about" through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the Falstaff of a certain section of festive dub life. Socially, Mr. Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the Gormer world and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... was replaced in his old charge, and seems to have spent the rest of his life quietly in the country, enjoying the fresh air and the old English sports—'repenting at leisure moments,' as Shakspeare has it, of the early pruriencies of his muse; or, as the same immortal bard says of Falstaff, 'patching up his old body' for a better place. The date of his death is not exactly ascertained; but he seems to have got considerably to the shady side of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... "M'Andrews' Hymn," and often recited lines from the "Recessional." Of the great novelists Dickens was easily his first favourite; a long way behind came Scott, Stevenson and Jules Verne. Dickens he knew and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a relaxation from ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... proud of the Church and took great pleasure in showing to his friends the brasses it contained, including one bearing an effigy of Sir John Fastolf, whom he considered to be the original of Falstaff. He was also "very fond of his trees. He quite fretted if by some mischance he lost ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... relative to appointments to office, Mr. Adams answered: "My system has been, and continues to be, to nominate for reaeppointment all officers, for a term of years, whose commissions expire, unless official or moral misconduct is charged and substantiated against them. This does not suit the Falstaff friends 'who follow for the reward;' and I am importuned to serve my friends, and reproached for neglecting them, because I will not dismiss, or drop from executive favor, officers faithful and able, because they are my political opponents, to provide ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... all Europe is delighted when it rises with Astolfo in the air. We never pause to ask the poet whether such an animal exists. He has seen it, and we see it with his eyes. Talking trees do not startle us in Virgil and Tennyson. Puck and Titania, Hamlet and Falstaff, are as true for us as Luther and Napoleon so long as we are in the realm of Art. We grant the poet a free privilege because he will use it only for our pleasure. In Science pleasure is not an object, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... By the blessing of good temper and an easy life they may be slightly exceeded, but the itching palm brings on a kind of dropsy easily recognisable to the practised eye. I have seen an unjust Jemadar who might have walked with Sir John Falstaff. ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's Table Talk, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... through history. At various stages, Sir John Pudding (ostensibly Brawn [or John Brand], the famous cook of the Rummer in Queen Street who appears in Dr. King's Art of Cookery [1708]), becomes identifiable with King John, Sir John Falstaff, Walpole, Marlborough, and even Queen Anne (for the change in sexes see Key, p. 18). All of these enjoyed Dumpling, and their tastes are ostensibly approved while at the same time being heavily undercut with satiric indirection. Naturally enough, Walpole (although ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theater, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth and somewhat rasping voce di petti, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... fractiousness of our horses and the rapidity of his flight had prevented this desirable consummation. The Major even declared positively that he had seen the bear a long time before, and only rode over him "to scare him up," and said almost in the words of the redoubtable Falstaff, "that if we would do him honour for it, so; if not, we might scare up the next bear ourselves." Looking at the matter calmly and dispassionately afterward, I thought it extremely probable that if ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... like all other, is limited by a man's capacity for it; and some men seem to have very scant capacity for God. It is not easy to establish a point of contact between a Falstaff or a Becky Sharp and the Father of Jesus Christ. There is no community of interest or kinship of spirit. "Faith is assurance of things hoped for;" and where there is no craving for God, He is likely to remain incredible. Prepossession has almost everything to do with the commencement of ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... exhibit plays? Your patience, sirs: some observations made, You'll grant us equal to the scenic trade. He who to midnight ladders is no stranger You'll own will make an admirable Ranger, And sure in Filch I shall be quite at home: Some true-bred Falstaff we may hope to start. The scene to vary, we shall try in time To treat you with a little pantomime. Here light and easy Columbines are found, And well-tried Harlequins with us abound. From durance vile our precious selves to keep, We ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... was a fat old knight named Sir John Falstaff. Once Falstaff was boasting that he and three men had beaten and almost killed two men in buckram suits who had attacked and tried to rob them. The prince led him on and gave him a chance to brag as much as ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... and then proceeds to heap abusive words on some person not mentioned by name but evidently only too well known to both the sender and the receiver of the epistle. Having compiled a list of scurrilities worthy of Falstaff, and attacked another matter which was an abomination to him, Harvey vents his wrath in sundry Latin charges, one of which runs: 'C{ae}tera fer{e}, ut olim: Bellum inter capita et membra continuatum.' 'Other matters are much as they were: war kept ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... after this conversation. Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'Did you see Foote at Brighthelmstone? Did you think he would so soon be gone? Life, says Falstaff, is a shuttle [Merry Wives of Windsor, act v. sc. 1]. He was a fine fellow in his way; and the world is really impoverished by his sinking glories. Murphy ought to write his life, at least to give the world a Footeana. Now will any of his contemporaries ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the exception of Garrick's excellence in low comedy. Indeed he seems to have combined in himself the various powers of the three greatest modern actors, of Garrick, except as before excepted, of Barry, and of Mossop; add to which, he played Falstaff as well as Quin. The present writer got this from old Macklin, who was stored with anecdotes ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... of a fact which he himself knew full well, namely, that most of these provisions never reached the garrison, owing to the rapacity of the dragoons sent to collect them, who readily sold to one man what they took from another, and abused the Major's press for stores, pretty much as Sir John Falstaff did that of the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... have had an alibi. Maybe it was Judge Stone's instinct for party harmony that made him cross at you for dodging the Bunkers by driving down by the Hoosier settlement. He was cross, wasn't he? Instinct is a great matter, says Falstaff. He was mad on instinct, I reckon! And you drove off the road on instinct. Beware instinct,' say I on the authority aforesaid. It would have smoothed matters all out if the Bunker ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Augustine, were surprised and killed. The Indians took possession of the stage dresses, one of them arraying himself in the garb of Othello, another in that of Richard the Third, and another taking the costume of Falstaff. I think it was Wild Cat's gang who engaged in this affair, and I was told that after the capture of this chief and some of his warriors, they recounted the circumstances with great glee. At another place we passed a small thicket in which several armed Indians, as they afterward ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... the same wine which is now named sherry. Falstaff calls it sherris sack, and also sherris only, using in fact both names indiscriminately (2 Henry IV., Act IV. Sc. 3.). For various commentaries regarding it, see Blount's Glossographia; Dr. Venner's Via recta ad Vitam longam, published in 1637; ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... James I. was also strangely disturbed, and the license of a part of the community was perpetually giving rise to acts of blood and violence. The bravo of the Queen's day, of whom Shakspeare has given us so many varieties, as Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, Peto, and the other companions of Falstaff, men who had their humours, or their particular turn of extravaganza, had, since the commencement of the Low Country wars, given way to a race of sworders, who used the rapier and dagger, instead of the far less dangerous sword ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... for three months in the prison of the King's Bench. Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote in a gaol; and Smollett resolved, since he was now in one, that he would write a Don Quixote too. It maybe said of the Spaniard, according to Falstaff's boast, "that he is not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men;" and among the many attempts at imitation, to which the admirable original has given rise, Sir Launcelot Greaves is not one of the worst. That a young man, whose brain had been slightly affected by a disappointment ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... a genius, like Rachel as Horatia, or Hackett as Falstaff, may actually seem to be the character assumed by virtue of a transforming imagination, but I suppose the fact to be that getting into a costume, absurdly antiquated and remote from all the habits and associations of the actor, largely accounts for the incongruity and ridiculousness ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Lord Windsor, had to boast some distinctions, which kept him aloof from the boys of his time. He was of that inordinate size that, like Falstaff, four square yards on even ground were so many miles to him; and the struggles which he underwent to raise himself when down might have been matter of instruction to a minority member. In the entrance to his Dame's gate much circumspection ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... he makes men talk the way they do in life. I reckon he couldn't get printed to-day. It's a right down shame Shakespeare couldn't know about poker. He'd have had Falstaff playing all day at that Tearsheet outfit. And the Prince ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... In this, the first introduction of Falstaff, observe the consciousness and the intentionality of his wit, so that when it does not flow of its own accord, its absence is felt, and an effort visibly made to recall it. Note also throughout how Falstaff's pride is gratified in the power of influencing a prince of the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... wanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after the first performance of "Der Rosenkavalier." But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almost antipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger" or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and imparts to the auditor the joy, the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... 'The gendarmerie,' says our author, 'have a busy time of it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were marching by; and garden fruit and vegetables, of course, share the results produced by a rigid application of the maxim, that la propriete c'est la vol. Where these people come from is a puzzle. There will be vagrants and strollers among them from all parts of France—from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... commonly nothing more than Falstaff's "call me horse"; but as applied to Sporus the term "cutt-boy" was literally correct. For what follows in the text cf. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... not to have been able to persuade my old friend, George Radford, who wrote the paper on 'Falstaff' in the former volume, to contribute anything to the second series of Obiter Dicta. In order to enjoy the pleasure of reading your own books over and over again, it is essential that they should be written either wholly or in part ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... much to alienate many from the Church found strong illustrations in the worldliness which seemed to settle down awhile on St. Paul's and its services. Clergymen appeared here to be hired (Chaucer's Prologue), and lawyers met their clients. Falstaff "bought Bardolph at Paul's." But before we come to the great changes, it will be well to go back and take note of the surroundings of the cathedral, and also to stroll through the interior, seeing that we have now come to its completion as a building, except for one addition, ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... ask again, therefore, what is the peculiar source of De Foe's power? He has little, or no dramatic power, in the higher sense of the word, which implies sympathy with many characters and varying tones of mind. If he had written 'Henry IV.,' Falstaff, and Hotspur, and Prince Hal would all have been as like each other as are generally the first and second murderer. Nor is the mere fact that he tells a story with a strange appearance of veracity sufficient; for a story may be truth-like and yet deadly dull. Indeed, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight. Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses on Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of Falstaff. The public authorities seem to have been often at a loss how to deal with the plunderers. At one time it was announced in the Gazette, that several persons, who were strongly suspected of being highwaymen, but against ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... education of the children of their countrymen! Were the truth attainable, the amount expended by them would be found to bear to the amount received by them from their propaganda of unbelief much less than the proportion of Falstaff's 'pennyworth of bread' to his 'intolerable deal of sack!' While the Catholics of France have been giving millions to defend the right of the French people to protect the faith of their children, these men have been ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and unknown all through its fresher ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the law does not seem to have been confined to the judges of the Superior Courts. It extended to the rural magistrates, some of whom turned their offices to commodity in a manner which would have excited the admiration of Falstaff himself. "The shop-keepers," writes Mr. Jackson, "are Justices of Peace. They have the means of extortion, and the power of enforcing payments. They are first the criminals, then the judges; and the court of appeal seems to be so constructed as ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... by his being called upon, and, as it were, compelled, by the nature of his audience, to rouse them with his thunder, and to melt them with his dew. I question much if the age of Charles II. would have borne the introduction of Othello or Falstaff. We may find something like Dryden's self-complacent opinion expressed by the editor of Corneille, where he civilly admits, "Corneille etoit inegal comme Shakespeare, et plein de genie comme lui: mais le ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... not handsome; he is fat and flabby (of the Falstaff type), with a long beard, short hair, and small eyes; but he is very clever, as clever as Beaumont, which is ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... wrongdoer ever thought well of it. The thief in jail, the mob-leader in the hands of the police, and the murderer on the drop will be unanimous in favor of this new heresy of the unconstitutionality of Constitutions, with its Newgate Calendar of confessors, martyrs, and saints. Falstaff's famous regiment would have volunteered to a man for its propagation or its defence. Henceforth let every unsuccessful litigant have the right to pronounce the verdict of a jury sectional, and to quash all proceedings and retain the property in controversy by seceding from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... rioters were arrested, tried and convicted. The trials of some of them are now before me. How deeply Fleet was implicated in these disturbances was never known, but being of the same mind with Jack Falstaff, that "the better part of valor is discretion," thought it prudent to put the Ocean between himself and danger. He made his way to this country and arrived in Boston, 1712. Being a man of some enterprise he soon established a printing office in Pudding lane (now Devonshire street), ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies - Without Addition or Abridgement • Munroe and Francis
... at Brighthelmstone?—Did you think he would so soon be gone?—Life, says Falstaff, is a shuttle. He was a fine fellow in his way; and the world is really impoverished by his sinking glories. Murphy ought to write his life, at least, to give the world a Footeiana. Now, will any of his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Sir Symonds D'Ewes for his admiration of two anagrams, expressive of the feelings of the times. It required the valour of Falstaff to attack extinct anagrams; and our pretended English Bayle thought himself secure in pronouncing all anagrammatists to be wanting in judgment and taste: yet, if this mechanical critic did not know something of the state and nature of anagrams ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... his mind, he draws his sword, salutes the universe, kneels at the cross, and then, with joy in his heart, or rather a deep and steady sense of well-being, moves forward to the world, prepared to fight. Fighting is the thing. Yes, but here is neither Don Quixote nor Falstaff. He will fight warily, take no unnecessary risk, and strike only when he is ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Every one must be huddled inside the walls. If a solitary house, like this castle, is built without, it must be in itself an impregnable fortress. This fine old ruin, in obedience to this instinct of jealous distrust, has but one entrance, and that so narrow that Sir John Falstaff would have been embarrassed to accept its hospitalities. In the shade of the broken walls, grass-grown and gay with scattered poppies, I looked at Toledo, fresh and clear in the early day. On the extreme right lay the new spick-and-span bull-ring, then the great hospice ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the present Southampton-buildings, Chancery-lane, stood the mansion of the Wriothesleys, Earls of Southampton, one of whom was the celebrated friend of Shakspeare. But what have we not omitted also? No less an illustrious head than the Boar's, in Eastcheap—the Boar's Head Tavern, the scene of Falstaff's revels. We believe the place is still marked out by a similar sign. But who knows not Eastcheap and the Boar's Head? Have we not all been there time out of mind? And is it not a more real, as well as notorious thing to us, than the London Tavern, or the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... been his especial interest. That he would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous, dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern. Georgian London? What better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country? For a vision of Corinthian ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... of the king. But, in a literary sense, it is unequal to Richard II., or the two parts of Henry IV. The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy, and it contains his master-creation in the region of low comedy, the immortal Falstaff. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... ever-memorable scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor, when Jack Falstaff, disguised as the fat woman of Brentford, is escaping from Ford's house, he is cuffed and mauled by Ford, who exclaims, "Hang her, witch!" on which the honest Cambrian Sir Hugh Evans sapiently remarks: "Py ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Bill, and then coolly—as though it were a pure matter of business—he put in juxtaposition the enactments of the Bill, and the contrast was as laughter provoking with all its deadly seriousness, as the conflict between the story of Falstaff and the contemptuously quiet rejoinder of Prince Hal. Lord Randolph was taken in hand; he was soon disposed of. Then Mr. Dunbar Barton was crumpled up and flung away. Sir Edward Clarke ventured an interruption; ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... stunted and dwarfed below the waist was trying to sneer into disuse all walking the world over, or one who was paunched by fat living beyond carrying power, larding the lean earth, fearing lest he sweat himself to death, some Falstaff who unbuttons him after supper and sleeps on benches after noon. Rather these words should connote the strong, the self-reliant, the youthful. He is a tramp, we should say, who relies most on his own legs and resources, who least cushions himself daintily against jar in his neighbor's tonneau, whose ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... idiom, ran thus—"We'll hae moonlight again." Now, the young laird was one who considered it his chief honour to give effect to both the spirit and the letter of his family motto. Permitting us again to refer to honest Falstaff, it implied that they were "gentlemen of the night;" and he was not one who would loll upon his pillow when his "avocation" called ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... in his part of Falstaff, was an actor who gave Mr. Lincoln great delight. With his usual desire to signify to others his sense of obligation, Mr. Lincoln wrote a genial little note to the actor expressing his pleasure at witnessing his performance. Mr. Hackett, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ludicrous sometimes led to faults in his tragedies (which was not often the case), he has made us amends by the character of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most substantial comic character that ever was invented. Sir John carries a most portly presence in the mind's eye; and in him, not to speak it profanely, 'we behold the fullness of the spirit of wit and humour bodily'. We are as well acquainted ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... very rakish and very crafty.) It must have been abandoned long ago by wild pirates of the southern seas; for clinging to the rigging, and jovially cheering as the ship went down, I made out a man with blazing eyes, clad in a velveteen jacket. As the ship disappeared from sight, Falstaff rushed to the rescue of the lonely navigator—and stole his purse! But Miranda persuaded him to give it back. Stevenson said, "Who steals my purse steals trash." Falstaff laughed and called this a good joke, as good as any he had ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... scholarly face, and noting his faultlessly neat apparel, and easy, graceful manners, would have thought of such a thing. Yet he was a—I falter in writing it—a drunkard. At times he drank deeply and madly. When half intoxicated he was almost as brilliant as Hamlet, and as rollicking as Falstaff. It was said that even when fully drunk his splendid intellect never entirely ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... out of which the Jackson and Decker buildings spring with a noble disregard of all rules and a delicious incongruity that reminds one of Falstaff’s corps of ill-drilled soldiers. Madison Square, however, is facile princeps, with its annex to the Hoffman House, a building which would make the fortune of any dime museum that could fence it in ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... called Shakespeare, and 'Slender Billy,' Pitt. The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put an extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of fun and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to write you a word in the Dial. Had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head,—march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through Coventry with such a set!)—some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the Dial. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... between the extremes of joy and sorrow; it was creative in that, from any given emotion or motive, it could form a human character who should be completely governed by that motive. Ambition in Macbeth, pride in Coriolanus, wit in Mercutio, broad humor in Falstaff, indecision in Hamlet, pure fancy in Ariel, brutality in Richard, a passionate love in Juliet, a merry love in Rosalind, an ideal love in Perdita,—such characters reveal Shakespeare's power to create living men and women from a ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... then came forth the unhappy Jane Shore, pale, exhausted, and starving; no one daring to offer a mouthful of food to save the poor wretch from death. But the scene changes. It is night; and I see Falstaff and his companions at the rising of the moon, 'by whose light they steal.' They go forth and are lost sight of in the misty shadows of those dark, time-worn buildings; and anon we hear him waging battle with the 'ten ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... as he saw it, and if he ever prevaricated it was simply by failing to mention certain things that he considered were no credit to anybody. But his friendships were shallow; those he respected most, say Michelangelo and Raphael, treated him as Prince Henry finally did Falstaff, never allowing him to come within half a mile of their person on penalty. He was intimate with so many women that he apologized for not remembering them; he had no interest in his children, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... arrangements with the liveliest satisfaction. The carriages now beginning to take up their company, and move away, we got into ours, and drove off too, armed with little wire masks for our faces; the sugar-plums, like Falstaff's adulterated sack, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and the tone of insufferable affectation with which they were uttered, roused my corruption to its utmost pitch, and I exclaimed aloud, "Think not, thou revivification of Falstaff—thou enlarged edition of Lambert—thou folio of humanity—thou Titan—thou Briareus—thou Sphynx—thou Goliath of Gath, that I shall bend beneath thy ponderous insolence?" The Mountain was amazed at my courage; I was amazed at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... the latter, had the question been raised, but it was not. I did not fight, for, as I have said, I seemed to have an instinctive dread of doing something terrible in the event of my getting engaged in combat with another. Like Falstaff, it may be, I was a coward on instinct. I have always thought, moreover, that the Hudibrastic aphorism is worthy of practice, because nothing can be more ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... "trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight. Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses at Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of Poins and Falstaff." The terrors of one generation become the sources of romance and amusement to later times. Four hundred years ago we should have regarded William of Deloraine as an extremely commonplace and inconvenient personage: he is now much more interesting than ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... livelihood by agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor was sure ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the famous Shakespearian emendation whereby Falstaff on his death-bed "babbled o' ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... quantities which he avers to be identically the same, but the greater the one the less the other. He had a truth in his mind, which his notions of quantity were inadequate to clothe in language. This erroneous phraseology has not found a defender; and I am almost inclined to say, with Falstaff, The poor abuses ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... no rule save freedom), "Do what you will." Of such a fraternity, love and marriage are the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare's Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit; he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such a disreputable associate if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked lewd rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," and we cannot part ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Page"), Wolf-Ferrari's Florindo breathes out his languishing "Ah, Rosaura!" And in the lively chatter of the women there is frequently more than a suggestion of the lively gossip of Verdi's merry wives in his incomparable "Falstaff." Wolf-Ferrari is neither a Mozart nor a Verdi, not even a Nicolai, as a melodist, but he is worthy of being bracketed with them, because as frankly as they he has spoken the musical language which to him seemed ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt always of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred of the strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of ex-President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary, or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily; and he loved Falstaff and Hudibras and coarse laughter, and the old England of Washington Irving and the memory of Charles the Second's courtly days. His progress was necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost situations; there was something in ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... respectfully addressed by one of his admirers, James Quin, the Falstaff of the day, and the rival at this time of Garrick in tragic characters, though the general opinion was, that he could not long maintain a standing against the younger genius and his ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... lover to stumble home alone in the dark. She spoke to him of his luckless courtship of Widow Denison (a most unpleasant topic), thus giving a clue to the whole situation, in showing that Madam Winthrop resented his desertion of her in his first widowerhood, and like Falstaff, would not "undergo a sneap without reply." He ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... find ourselves in any doubt as to the real and more essential affinities of each. It is not by the wit which he has infused into his talk, so much as by the humour with which he has delineated the character, that Shakspeare has given his Falstaff an abiding place in our memories. It is not the repartees of Benedick and Beatrice, but the immortal fatuity of Dogberry, that the name of Much Ado About Nothing recalls. None of the verbal quips ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... realities; all this array of machine and workshop, all this marshalled power and purpose, has been the creation of inventor and business organiser. But are we not a little too free with that word "creation"? Falstaff was a "creation" perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls; there we have indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but did these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain unavoidable imperatives? Seeking ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... thus called Cassius Clay Company, organized for the defence of Washington until troops came. For several days patrolled, drilled, and lay several nights on the hard floor. Had compensation, that the drill often reproduced that of Falstaff's heroes. But my campaigners would have fought well in case of emergency. Most of them office-seekers. When the alarm was over, the company dissolved, but each got a kind of certificate beautifully written and signed by ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Milan in 1887. The surrender of Italian opera was complete, and Verdi took his right place at the head of the vigorous new school which has arisen in Italy, and which promises to regain for the "Land of Song" some of her ancient preeminence in music. A comic opera by Verdi, "Falstaff," was announced in 1892: it has well ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Thomas Cranley was a good deal older than the company in which he found himself. Without being one of the hoary youths who play Falstaff to every fresh heir's Prince Harry, he was a middle-aged man, too obviously accustomed to the society of boys. His very dress spoke of a prolonged youth. A large cat's-eye, circled with diamonds, blazed solitary in his shirt-front, and his coat was cut after the manner of the contemporary ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... philosophy and vigour of criticism rarely exhibited in the history of real or fictitious biography. "In wisdom," writes Professor Ferrier, "the Shepherd equals the Socrates of Plato; in humour, he surpasses the Falstaff of Shakspeare; clear and prompt, he might have stood up against Dr Johnson in close and peremptory argument; fertile and copious, he might have rivalled Burke in amplitude of declamation; while his opulent imagination and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... which colours all the scenes of the poet's life in Warwickshire with the atmosphere of the sixteenth century, and summons to meet us in the streets of Stratford costumes and characters contemporary with Falstaff, Shallow, and Dogberry so well, that we do not see the Clods in corduroys, the commercial Gents in paletots, and the Police in trim blue, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... not only can be, but must be, taken seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such comedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humour which steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with Oedipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little segment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those of nature, its requirements are not the requirements ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... exception of the quality of courage, I never met a man who contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff as the individual who furnished me with Major Monsoon. But the major—I must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own—was a man of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my thinking ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving- knife; at any rate, he slid it to one ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and a sort of sighing patience which one is often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an upper-form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting master might behave to a good-looking ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... glorying self-unrighteousness, that distinguish another class of characters which the dramatists of the age of Charles and Anne were unwearied in providing with insolence and repartees. Occasionally we have a jest which Falstaff would not disown. Thus in "May-Day," when Cuthbert, a barber, approaches Quintiliano, to get, if possible, "certain odd crowns" the latter owes him, Quintiliano says, "I think thou 'rt newly married?" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... happening in these Essays: and we know how often enough a writer finds his own creation kicking over the traces, as it were, and becoming almost independent of his volition. There is no original for Sir Roger or Falstaff or Mr. Micawber: they may not have sprung Athena-like fully armed out of the author's head, and they may have been suggested by some one he had in mind. But once created they came into a full-blooded life with personalities entirely of ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... be eating his supper now, at what hour can he possibly have dined! A second solid mass of rump-steak has disappeared, and he eat the first in four minutes and three quarters, by the clock over the window. Was there ever such a personification of Falstaff! Mark the air with which he gloats over that Stilton, as he removes the napkin which has been placed beneath his chin to catch the superfluous gravy of the steak, and with what gusto he imbibes the porter which has ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... however myriad-minded we may consider him. An instinct which would have rendered him aware of each and every individual of five thousand that he had employed once only would be as inconceivable as that of Falstaff, which made him discern the heir-apparent in Prince Hal when disguised as a highwayman. In short, Shakespeare could not be conscious of all the words he had once used, more than Brigham Young could recognize all the wives ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... There never was, perhaps, such a lachrymose countenance as this poor lad's, and this added still more to the mirth of others, being also considered as put on for the occasion. Stephen Kemble played Falstaff without stuffing—Num played the fool without any effort or preparation. Jumbo was also "picked up;" this was not done by Melchior, who stated, that any body might have him who claimed him; he tumbled ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... of course, some officers in the service who went far beyond the limits of such venial irregularities and, like Falstaff, "misused the king's press damnably." Though according to the terms of their warrant they were "to take care not to demand or receive any money, gratuity, reward, or any other consideration whatsoever for the sparing, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... regarded him with a fine jovial scorn, much as Sir John Falstaff might have regarded the inventor ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... in sight of the wooded steep of Haughmond, Shakspere's "bosky hill." It commands the field where Falstaff fought "an hour by the Shrewsbury clock;" and has still a thicket, called the Bower, from which Queen Eleanor is said to have watched the battle in which the fortunes of her husband were involved. A castellated ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... these he cunningly intermingled select scenes from the comedies of the best English dramatists. From Kirkman's book, which is now highly prized from its rarity, it appears that the "drollery" entitled "The Bouncing Knight, or the Robbers Robbed," is, in truth, a famous adventure of Sir John Falstaff's, set forth in close accordance with the original text; while the comedy of "Rule a Wife and have a Wife" is reduced to a brief entertainment called "The Equal Match." Other popular plays are similarly dealt with. But Cox, it seems, invented ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and the straw they were packed in consequently heating. The sick were transferred from the Briton to the Runnymede. This afternoon the soldiers were paraded for the first time since the wreck. Their appearance, owing to their distressed situation, was somewhat similar to that of Falstaff's ragged regiment. ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... "I will cheerfully contribute that relic if upon his part Brother Bristol will contribute his portrait of Eliphalet W. Blatchford disguised as Falstaff." (Cheers.) ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... in the list is Cook, for Earl is a nickname. Cook was perhaps the last occupative title to hold its own against the inherited name. Justice Shallow, welcoming Sir John Falstaff, says— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... ever written is contained in four words of the present Poet Laureate's Ode for the Tercentenary of Shakespeare, 'London's laughter is thine'. The wit of our trenches in this war, especially perhaps among the Cockney and South country regiments, is pure Shakespeare. Falstaff would find himself at home there, and would recognize a brother ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... was a London street, named Bucklersbury (near the present Mansion House), noted for its number of druggists who sold Simples and sweet-smelling herbs. We read, in [ix] The Merry Wives of Windsor, that Sir John Falstaff flouted the effeminate fops of his day as "Lisping hawthorn buds that smell like Bucklersbury in ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... lapels of a man-o'-war-man's jacket.... If you should wrap a large salt fish around a small boy, he would have a coat of such fashion as I have seen many a one wear at muster." Or, if we wish to go back still further, we might exclaim, with Falstaff, "You would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks.... No eye ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... any rate, I was sixty-five last birthday. This is my appearance as I see it in the glass before me: tall, spare (I don't weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds—the desert has any superfluous flesh that I ever owned, my lot having been, like Falstaff, to lard the lean earth, but in a hot climate); my eyes are brown, my face is long, and I wear a pointed white beard, which ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard |
