the Gadshill expedition as a grave offence, punishable by the defective criminal code of the period. He summoned Sir John to appear before him to answer the charge. Sir John treated the invitation with the contempt it deserved, and went off to kill Percy-stay, that is a slip of the pen I should say, to distinguish himself in the glorious field of Shrewsbury. It will hardly be supposed that the tidings of Sir John Falstaff's safe return from action under a perfect forest of fresh-grown laurels were particularly agreeable to Sir William Gascoigne. Gall and wormwood, on the contrary, may be assumed to have been the flavour imparted by them to the chief judicial mind. At any rate, it is indisputable that his lordship had not many days heard of our hero's safe arrival and honoured treatment in London when he took a walk, attended only by a single follower, for the express purpose of taking Sir John Falstaff into custody. There is but one consideration which makes such a proceeding wholly inexcusable—namely, that the Justice should have nursed his vindictiveness for a period of so many months. This, it must be admitted, argues a relentless and unforgiving nature. The Chief Justice was an artful man, as will be believed from his having risen to high rank in the legal profession. He thought it prudent to veil his malignant design even from his attendant. "What's he that goes there?" He enquired, breaking off a general conversation to point towards a stout gentleman whom he saw walking leisurely down the street followed by a diminutive page. "Falstaff, an't please your Lordship." His Lordship affected absence of mind. "He that was in question for the robbery ?" The robbery! You observe, reader? There was but one robbery present to his Lordship's mind, and that one committed possibly more than a twelvemonth back. "He, my Lord: but he hath since done good service at Shrewsbury; and, as I hear, is now going with some charge to the Lord John of Lancaster." "What, to York?" The countenance of his worship fell considerably. These tidings were baffling to his hopes of vengeance. Sir John Falstaff was once more in the king's commission, and consequently not liable to arrest. Still Sir William was loth to let his prey slip wholly away from him. "Call him back," he said to his servant. There was some difficulty in getting the knight to arrest his course. DEFEAT OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE. 97 In the first place, he was afflicted with a sudden deafness. This temporary obstacle overcome, he showed an obtuseness of understanding as to what was said to him that was really surprising in a man of his intellectual antecedents. At length the Justice attacked him personally, with— "Sir John Falstaff, a word with you." The Chief Justice had his wish-rather more than his wish, in fact. Sir John Falstaff's manner of gratifying it shall be given in the exact words of the chronicler*: SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-My good lord! God give your lordship good time of day. I am glad to see your lordship abroad; I heard say your lordship was sick: I hope your lordship goes abroad by advice. Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, hath yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time; and I most humbly beseech your lordship, to have a reverend care of your health. CHIEF JUSTICE.-Sir John, I sent for you before your expedition to Shrewsbury. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-An't please your lordship, I hear his majesty is returned with some discomfort from Wales. CHIEF JUSTICE.-I talk not of his majesty: - You would not come when I sent for you. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. — And I hear, moreover, his highness is fallen into this same villainous apoplexy. CHIEF JUSTICE.- Well, heaven mend him! I pray you, let me speak with you. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.- This apoplexy is, as I take it, a kind of lethargy, an't please your lordship; a kind of sleeping in the blood, a rascally tingling. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.—It hath its original from much grief; from study, and perturbation of the brain I have read the cause of his effects in Galen: it is a kind of deafness. CHIEF JUSTICE. -I think you are fallen into the disease; for you hear not what I say to you. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. — Very well, my lord, very well: rather, an't please you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal. CHIEF JUSTICE. To punish you by the heels would amend the attention of your ears; and I care not, if I do become your physician. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient; your lordship may minister the potion of imprisonment to me, in respect of poverty; but how I should be your patient to follow your prescriptions, the wise may make some dram of a scruple, or, indeed, a scruple itself. CHIEF JUSTICE.—I sent for you, when there were matters against you for your life, to come speak with me. As I was then advised by my learned counsel in the laws of this SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.land-service, I did not come. CHIEF JUSTICE.— Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater, and my waist slenderer. CHIEF JUSTICE. -You have misled the youthful prince. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-The young prince hath misled me: I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog. CHIEF JUSTICE. -Well, I am loath to gall a new-healed wound: your day's service at Shrewsbury hath a little gilded over your night's exploit on Gads-hill: you may thank the unquiet time for your quiet o'er-posting that action. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.- My lord ? Chief Justice. — But since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-To wake a wolf is as bad as to smell a fox. CHIEF JUSTICE.-What! you are as a candle, the better part burnt out. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-A wassel candle, my lord: all tallow: if I did say of wax, my growth would approve the truth. CHIEF JUSTICE. — There is not a white hair on your face, but should have his effect of gravity. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. — His effect of gravy, gravy, gravy. CHIEF JUSTICE.-You follow the young prince up and down, like his ill angel. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.- Not so, my lord; your ill angel is light; but, I hope, he that looks upon me will take me without weighing: and yet, in some respects, I grant, I cannot go, I cannot tell. Virtue is of so little regard in these coster-monger times, that true valour is turned bearherd. Pregnancy is made a tapster, and hath his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings: all the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. You, that are old, consider not the capacities of us that are young: you measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls; and we that are in the vaward of our youth, I must confess, are wags too. CHIEF JUSTICE. - Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye? a dry hand? a yellow cheek? a white beard? a decreasing leg? an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken? your wind short? your chin double? your wit single? and every part about you blasted with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John ! SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something a round belly. For my voice,-I have lost it with hollaing, and singing of anthems. To approve my youth farther, I will not: the truth is, I am only old in judgment and understanding; and he that will caper with me for a thousand marks, let him lend me the money, and have at him. For the box o' the ear that the Prince gave you, he gave it like a rude prince, and you took it like a sensible lord. I have checked him for it, and the young lion repents; marry, not in ashes and sackcloth, but in new silk, and old sack. CHIEF JUSTICE.-Well, God send the Prince a better companion! SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-God send the companion a better prince! I cannot rid my hands of him. CHIEF JUSTICE.-Well, the King hath severed you and Prince Harry. I hear you are going with Lord John of Lancaster against the Archbishop and the Earl of Northumberland. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-Yea; I thank your pretty sweet wit for it. But look you pray, all you that kiss my lady peace at home, that our armies join not in a hot day; for, by the Lord, I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily: if it be a hot day, an I brandish any thing but my bottle, I would I might never spit white again. There is not a dangerous action can peep out his head, but I am thrust upon it: well, I cannot last ever. [But it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. If you will needs say I am an old man, you should give me rest. I would to God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is: I were better to be eaten to death with rust, than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. ] CHIEF JUSTICE.-Well, be honest, be honest; and God bless your expedition! SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.-Will your lordship lend me a thousand pound to furnish me forth? CHIEF JUSTICE. Not a penny, not a penny: you are too impatient to bear crosses. Fare you well: commend me to my cousin Westmoreland. I consider this utter defeat of my Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne one of the most brilliant triumphs of Sir John Falstaff's victorious life. DEFENCE OF CHIEF JUSTICE GASCOIGNE. 99 "If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle," said Jack, looking after the retreating form of his defeated adversary with ineffable contempt. "Boy!" "Sir?" said the small page. "What money is in my purse?" "Seven groats and twopence." "I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing "only lingers it out, but the disease is incurable. Go, bear this letter to my "Lord of Lancaster; this to the Prince; this to the Earl of Westmoreland; " and this to old Mistress Ursula, whom I have weekly sworn to marry since I perceived the first white hair on my chin. About it; you know where "to find me." 66 And pray, who was old Mistress Ursula? We may chance to hear of her by and bye. II. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED: DEFENCE OF THE CHARACTER OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE GASCOIGNE: CHARITABLE CONSTRUCTION OF HIS CONDUCT IN THE CELEBRATED ACTION OF QUICKLY v. FALSTAFF. I WOULD that full justice to the greatness, wisdom, and magnanimity of my much calumniated hero could be accomplished without the painful task of censuring and exposing the conduct of those enemies to whose machinations he owed penury, neglect, and persecution in his lifetime-obloquy and misrepresentation after death. To censure at any time is a disagreeable task; more especially when the object of your strictures is a personage whose memory successive generations have held in reverential esteem. It is a thankless office to be the first to call attention to a stain on a reputation hitherto deemed spotless-as it is to be the first to tell your sleeping neighbour that his roof is burning. The raven is an honest bird and croaks the approach of bad weather with unerring truthfulness; but the raven is universally hated. I am aware that there are certain writers who have a taste for this kind of discovery, whose minds' eyes may be compared to a solar telescope, finding out an unsightly mass of blots, blurs, and creases, when the world at large can see nothing but uniform, cheering light. These gentlemen -who, supposing the mind to have a nose as well as an eye, may be called the carrion crows of literary judgment—so keen is their scent for a decom posing reputation, and so intense their enjoyment of dead excellence that has turned bad-are not desirable models for imitation. Neither are their antipodes the couleur de rose critics, who deaden their mental nostrils to any "fly-blown" indications in a character they are compelled to digest; preferring to swallow the whole with hopeful self-persuasion that all has been good, wholesome, and nutritious. The conscientious and impartial writer will endeavour to observe a medium course between these two. But that course, how difficult to discover and observe! The soundest human judgment, like the strongest eyesight, is fallible. What we think are spots on the sun may but be the dazzling effect of more pure light than our imperfect optic nerves can sustain. We may think we are about to strip a masquerading daw, and at our first rude grip a heartrending cry will tell us that we have ruined the jewelled train of a majestic peacock! The above I admit to be a specimen of that logical process known as "beating about the bush," a proof that I am staggering, like the pencil-leg of a knock-knced compass, round a point which I have much hesitation in coming to. The case of the obscure youth who acquired immortality by burning Diana's temple, is a stale illustration, but I am fain to use it for want of better. It might be thought that I am aspiring to a renown like that of Erostratus, if the arguments of this chapter should result-as I hope and trust they will not-in a balance of probability to the effect that the venerated name of Sir William Gascoigne was really that of one of the most contemptible scoundrels that ever occupied his wrong place in a court of justice. I repeat that I hope my patient pursuit of truth in this very trying matter will not bring me to a standstill at so awkward a point. Nay, so terrified am I at the bare possibility of doing irreparable injustice to a great man's memory, that I will lose no time in admitting that very probably Sir William Gascoigne was a ten times greater, wiser, and more immaculate being than even his eulogists have represented him, and that, in a still greater likelihood, I myself am an obtuse purblind personage, with no soul to appreciate the more exalted virtues, and with a deplorable squint in my critical vision. Having admitted this as a possibility-without asserting it as a fact-of myself, I may be surely allowed the same speculative margin quoad the hypothesis of the Lord Chief Justice now under discussion, not having been, to use the mildest expression, the man he has been taken for. At the same time the reader will understand that I do not wish him to attach to my opinion (should I succeed in forming one on this most trying subject) more weight than is due to the honest expression of a private individual's most impartial judgment, the result of patient, untiring investigation of the most copious and incontrovertible facts, aided by a paramount thirst for truth and an intellect habituated to moral analysis. |