thief and a liar. In the play, as in real life, are we shown how wit and good-humour may serve as a veil between our clear sight and the vices it should see and know.

To lighten his charges, Falstaff dismisses his servants. Bardolph is provided for, because the host of the "Garter" takes him for the time into his own service as tapster. Pistol and Nym are dismissed to live upon what plunder they can find for themselves. Pistol looks to false dice

Gourd and fullam were cant names for hollow and loaded dice, and there were distinctions between high fullams and low. Thus Ben Jonson writes in "Every Man Out of His Humour," "Who, he serve? He keeps high men and low men, he has a fair living at fullam."

Pistol and Nym take their revenge on Falstaff, by betraying to Master Page and Master Ford Falstaff's intention to find the money he wants by drawing upon their substance through the trapping of their wives into dishonesty. "I will be cheater to them both," he says (that is, escheater, exacter of forfeits due to the lord of a manor), "and they shall be exchequers to me; they shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both." He has no kindlier aim. His dialogues with "Master Brook" show him ready to fling either of the wives into a lower deep of degradation. It is enough that he shall get money from them, which he expects that they will steal for him from their husbands. Being at his wits' end for money, he relieves himself of the cost of keeping his servants, whose small thieveries are too conspicuous and do not pay their expenses, while he makes a large venture against other men's goods, that shall bring in more than a dozen midnight attacks upon travellers at Gad's Hill and elsewhere. It is also a device that fits the nature of a gross-minded coward. Low cunning never is clear-sighted, and its dim sight is apt to be further obscured by a thick bandage of vanity. Falstaff has not a high thought in his nature. Though his wit be intellectual, it always creeps upon the earth. The old amplified Church legend tells that Satan tempted Eve with promise that her mind would be filled with the light of heaven, and with profession that she would offend God if she did not eat the offered fruit. Daughters of Eve may yield to such temptation, and fall often through desire to rise. The serpent may prevail with them, but not the hog :-save where, through the injustice that has

made so wide a difference between man and man, some have-woe is to us for that-been born within the sty. Yet still Falstaff, with all his baseness, has for young men attraction in his wit, and more in his good-humour, and most in his companionable ways.

We need not fix a time for the action of this comedy that shall give it a particular place in the course of the story of the two parts of "King Henry IV." It is enough to say that we may regard it as an interlude in the trilogy formed by the two parts of " Henry IV." and "Henry V." Justice Shallow comes into it out of Gloucestershire; and Falstaff visited Shallow as an old friend of his youth in the Second Part of "Henry IV.," when he was recruiting soldiers for the civil war. The little page, given to Falstaff by Prince Hal, who seems to appear for the first time in the Second Part of "King Henry IV.," is also with him in "The Merry Wives of Windsor." The play, no doubt, was written after the Second Part of "Henry IV.," which was entered at Stationers' Hall in August, 1600, and may have been written before February, 1598. It has an imagined time of action after the battle of Shrewsbury, and within range of that "Second Part” which--though it runs ten years, from 1403 to 1413, into one swift tale-does not really pass beyond the year 1405 till the fourth scene of the Fourth Act. The comedy is carefully dissociated from the note of war and from all incidents that could confound it with the sequence of three plays through which there runs one narrative and which are knit together as essential parts of one poetical conception. It is not at all unlikely that "The Merry Wives of Windsor" may have been written after the completion of the trilogy and after the production of the play that told of Falstaff's death.

I have said nothing here of the supposed reference to Sir Thomas Lucy in the opening of the play. The dozen white luces in Justice Shallow's coat may possibly have been put there as a taunt against the squire of Charlcote. But it is more likely that the Lucys' arms contributed, perhaps even unconsciously, to the armorial bearings of Justice Shallow because of jokes that could be cracked upon them. Tradition about Shakespeare's deer-stealing at Charlcote-which was not in his time a deer park-is as little supported by fact as the idleness of the other inventions that have been associated with his name. The Second Part of "King Henry IV." has shown very clearly that into the first invention of Justice Shallow Shakespeare put a deep religious earnestness. It was a conception that had nothing in common with the petty spite and ridicule which make part of the life that gives its narrow bounds to the inventions of the gossip-mongers. He who banishes out of his conception of Shakespeare all the unproved small talk, accepting

U-VOL. X.

nothing but the few proved facts, will not find one fact out of accord with the spirit of the plays. No writer can live up to the highest level of his own ideal. But the man who has set before us, for all time, the purest and the noblest readings of the problems of life, must have had, in his own life, more than Falstaff could well understand. Some have found it easier to see Shakespeare as Falstaff would imagine him than to see Falstaff as Shakespeare knew him.

66

CHAPTER XI.

DANIEL AND DRAYTON.

DELIA" and "Rosamond" reappeared in 1594 with enlargement and with a new play by Daniel-his "Cleopatra." Daniel's 66 First Foure Bookes of the Civill Wars" were published in 1595; the fifth book was added in 1599, the sixth in 1602, the seventh and eighth seven years later, in the reign of James I.

Poems on
Civil War :
Daniel and
Drayton.

In 1596 Drayton produced his "Mortimeriados: the Lamentable Civell Warres of Edward the Second and the Barrons," this being the first edition of the work republished, with much alteration, as "The Barons' Wars" in 1603. There are six cantos, and Drayton's heroic poem is, like Daniel's, written in octave rhyme. Drayton says, in an introduction to the reader, that he began the poem in the seven-lined Chaucer stanza, but, finding that "the often harmonie thereof softened the verse more than the majesty of the subject would permit," he recast what he had so written.

Heroic
Measure.

Daniel's writings show, by many a touch, that he was well read in Italian. He has a refinement that rejects extravagant conceits, but to the finer influences of Italian literature he owes much of his grace. Restraint from prevalent excess brought Daniel's verse nearer to the style of a later generation that was deliberately putting such excess away. It was natural to Daniel that he should

use for his heroic poem the same stanza that, since Boccaccio's time, had been the heroic measure of Italy. But Drayton, by retracting his choice and use of the English stanza, based on octave rhyme,* that had been established as English heroic measure by the example of Chaucer, and by his substitution of Italian heroic measure, showed that the stanza which had held its own in the beginning of the reign, was now confused among the varied forms of a new wealth of poetry, and was no longer accepted as the measure proper for long narrative works of serious interest. It was only in the drama that blank verse had at this time established itself as the best measure for heroic poetry. Gascoigne had used it in "The Steel Glass"† for serious satire, but his example was not followed.

Outside the drama, then, Chaucer's stanza having been deposed from its throne, though Shakespeare wisely held by it in his "Lucrece," there is falling back for a time in Drayton and Daniel on the measure used for like purposes by the Italians, the octave rhyme. Two generations later there was an attempt made to set up another measure as our national heroic stanza. It was not first invented by Sir William Davenant, the first assertor of its claim. He might have found it among the numerous Elizabethan shapings of good thoughts to music, in Sir John Davies's "Nosce

Sir John

Davies.

Teipsum." John Davies--who did not become Sir John till after the death of Elizabeth-was born in 1570, third son of John Davies, a lawyer at Westbury, in Wiltshire. He was sent to Oxford at the age of fifteen, as commoner of Queen's College, and thence went to study law at the Middle Temple; but he returned to Oxford in 1590 and took his degree of B.A. He was called to the Bar in 1595, and in 1596 published a poem on the art of dancing, entitled "Orchestra." In the Middle Temple John Davies had been sometimes under * "E. W.," v. 132. "E. W." viii. 280, 281.