FALSTAFF. O, sir!"

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mortal dinner parties, can one observe about the lady who sits next him at the feast, "I spy entertainment in her"! "You are not young, no more am I," is a quotation more frequently appropriate, though never to be ventured. Again, "He wooes both high and low, both rich and poor"-how well it corresponds with the charming modern vulgarism," George is a gener

al courter, up with all, on with none." Often we are tempted to exclaim with Shallow, "Though we are justices, and doctors, and churchmen, Master Page, we have some salt of our youth in us; we are the sons of women, Master Page." Nor is any quotation from all Shakespeare more frequently in the human mouth than that of Mrs. Page, "What the dickens." "The wild

much more "ford" than he wanted. This is one of the qualities in Falstaff which our humble author had no difficulty in carrying on from his more important plays, namely, the good knight's good-humor about his bulk. "What a thing should I have been had I been swelled! I should have been a mountain of mummy."

If a mere penman may criticise an artist, it might perhaps be suggested that Mr. Abbey's Sir John is hardly "swelled" enough. Most of us who have lost the salt of our youth made Falstaff's acquaintance in Kenny Meadow's illustrated Shakespeare. There, the knight was indeed a mountain of mummy, and we can hardly think of him as one who could at most merely "burst a try-your-weight machine." Illustrators have a great responsibility; the old can make their own characters to their own fancy, but children believe in the first portraits they meet. If the Shakespearian heroines could be photographed from the retina of my mind's eye, I fear they would be of the variety of women which flourished in Books of Beauty when the century was scarce middle-aged.

It is impossible, perhaps, to maintain that the Merry Wives is absolutely worthy of Shakespeare. We have to allow, and we do allow, for hurry, for hack-work on a commission, for the impossibility of the subject. And yet we do not enjoy seeing Shakespeare treat Falstaff so lightly. Would Sir John have been concerned in the theft of the handle of Mistress Bridget's fan: "Didst thou not share, hadst thou not fifteen pence?" This was unworthy of the fat "minion of

the moon." Perhaps the petty larceny may justify those who think that the action is laid between Falstaff's loss of favor and his death. "The King has killed his heart," and he may have descended, when his gallant heart was killed, to fifteen pence for a third share in a stolen fan handle. On the other hand, a knight whose heart was killed by the very blackest example of even royal ingratitude recorded, is hardly the jolly knight who meets us in the Merry Wives. The truth is that Shakespeare did not trouble himself with these very petty considerations of time and place, either in this play or any others. He had to show Sir John making love, and he surrounded him with English folk, and he drew the jealous Ford with a freedom very unlike that of Molière. So frequently does Molière introduce the passion of jealousy, serious in Don Garcie, and only not quite serious in Arnolphe and George Dandin, that we may misdoubt he knew it only too well. The husband of Armande Béjart was likely to know it. We can even be almost sorry for poor Arnolphe, and the sonin-law of the De Sotenvilles. They prove that Dr. Caius was wrong when he said, "It is not jealous in France, by Gar; 'tis no de fashion of France." But Ford's "fantastical humors and jealousies" are purely comic. English middle-class life is not jealous, and we know that Mr. Ford has no occasion for his mad humors.

Molière's husbands are much less unequivocally unfortunate in their wives, and he has a kind of sympathy with the men, and you hear the sigh from the lips of the comic mask.

But Shakespeare has no resentment for "those pretty wrongs that liberty commits."

In England "it is not jealous." The Merry Wives themselves are as English as cowslips, or trout, or cricket. Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, with their innocent audacities, "not frugal of their mirth," and their outspoken humors, are daughters of old Honesty. As to "fair Mistress Anne," what more can one say than Dame Quickly says, "Anne is a good girl," or than

Fenton says, "Pretty Mistress Anne," or than Slender says, "O, sweet Anne Page!" How gracious is her modesty. "May be, he tells you true," when Page has told Fenton, ""Tis a thing impossible he should love her, but as a property." How very courteously she depresses Shallow; "Good Master Shallow, let him woo for himself." Anne Page passes like the Lady in Comus, like the Fairy Queen whose part she plays, through these big brawlers, "athwart the swag