"Falstaff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and 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 never employed the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to this—that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He undertook the task of writing the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 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; Nares' Glossary, &c. Cotgrave, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... questioned 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
... 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 careful ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... all carelessness, though! Some ill luck did mingle with a great deal of mismanagement, as the "one poor happ'orth of bread" with the huge gallon of sack in the bill of which Poins picked Falstaff's pocket when he was asleep behind the arras. Things belonging to me, or things that I cared for, did contrive to get lost, without my having any hand in the matter. For instance, if out of the variety of "talking birds," starlings, ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... and cow are looked upon as sacred, because these animals breathed upon the infant Jesus in the manger and kept the child warm. Old women sprinkle holy water on these animals to drive away disease" (480 (1893) 264). In I Henry IV. (Act II. Sc. 4) Falstaff says: "The lion will not touch the true Prince," and the divinity which hedged about the princes of human blood was ever present with the son of Joseph and Mary, whose divinity sprang from a purer, nobler fount ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... 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 them to these pages. He was an inimitable mimic, and ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... 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 tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... complex, involving always a double vision—a reference from the public or normal standard of 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 takes his private standard into battle with him. There is nothing more obviously ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... All historians of the drama have confused this great carriers' inn with the Boar's Head in Eastcheap made famous by Falstaff. The error seems to have come from the Analytical Index of the Remembrancia, which (p. 355) incorrectly catalogues the letter of March 31, 1602, as referring to the "Boar's Head in Eastcheap." The letter itself, however, when examined, gives no indication whatever ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... 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
... and have taken up Berni. The latter offends me. I suppose we women do not really care for humour. You are right in saying we have none ourselves, and 'cackle' instead of laugh. It is true (of me, at least) that 'Falstaff is only to us an incorrigible fat man.' I want to know what he illustrates. And Don Quixote—what end can be served in making a noble mind ridiculous?—I hear you say—practical. So it is. We are very narrow, I know. But ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is nearly opposite Gad's Hill Place, and dates probably from Queen Anne's time. It formerly had an old-fashioned swinging sign, on one side of which was painted Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor. In its long sanded room there was a copy of Shakespeare's monument in Westminster Abbey. Fifty years ago about ninety coaches ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... a single clause (since goodness has 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," ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... by thoughts, or by words, or by images. The first is our Butler's especial eminence; the second, Voltaire's; the third, which we oftener call fancy, constitutes the larger and more peculiar part of the wit of Shakspeare. You can scarcely turn to a single speech of Falstaff's without finding instances of it. Nor does wit always cease to deserve the name by being transient, or incapable of analysis. I may add that the wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to the French, and that of images ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... future as to the coup d'Etat of the Prince de Polignac himself? In consequence of a whim of Shakespeare—or perhaps it may have been a revenge, like that of Beaumarchais on Bergasse (Bergearss)—Falstaff is, in England, a type of the ridiculous; his very name provokes laughter; he is the king of clowns. Now, instead of being enormously pot-bellied, absurdly amorous, vain, drunken, old, and corrupted, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... of laws, broke every enactment; he caused the deported to rot by thousands in the horrible holds of the hulks; he sent to Lambessa and Cayenne one hundred and fifty children between twelve and fifteen; he who was more absurd than Falstaff, has become more terrible than Richard III; and why has all this been done? Because there was, he said, "a plot against his power;" because the year which was closing had a treasonable understanding with the year ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... 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 ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... and chaste since we have held Commune together on the world's highway; No Falstaff failings have my mind impelled To do misdeeds of ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... 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 ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... keep them closed." The registration for 1870, although twenty thousand less than in 1868, he declared, contained seventeen thousand known fraudulent entries.[1268] The newspapers strengthened his arguments. In one of Nast's cartoons Tweed as "Falstaff" reviews his army of repeaters, with Hoffman as sword-bearer, and Comptroller Sweeny, Mayor Hall, James Fisk, Jr., and Jay Gould as spectators.[1269] Another pre-election cartoon, entitled "The Power behind the Throne," presented Governor Hoffman crowned and robed as king, with Tweed grasping ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... should have adopted the title of "Latin in sport made learning in earnest"— which would give a tolerable idea of the nature of our undertaking. The doctrine, it is true, may bear the same relation to the lighter matter, that the bread in Falstaff's private account did to the liquor; though if we have given our reader "a deal of sack," we wish it may not be altogether "intolerable." Latin, however, is a great deal less like bread, to most boys, than it ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... Cricket and football order into violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys. In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... them of tours, hussar and highland dresses; Tell them that youth once gone returns no more, That hired huzzas redeem no land's distresses; Tell them Sir William Curtis is a bore, Too dull even for the dullest of excesses, The witless Falstaff of a hoary Hal, A fool whose bells have ceased ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... a large scale until the arrival of the free labourers and the troops, which it was said the Government was sending. Harry the Blower talked darkly of marauding bands, ambushed foes and perilous encounters on his road, all of which waxed in number and blood-thirstiness after the manner of Falstaff's men in buckram. But nobody ever took Harry the Blower's ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... hell to the latter. Yusuf and several more tolerant gentlemen held out hope of mercy to us all, as God was "the Compassionate and the Merciful." The chaouch also lectured the people on courage, and publicly maintained that the Fezzanees were all cowards. This fellow is a second Sir John Falstaff, without the corpulence. The tone of all members of the caravan, as I have mentioned, is now much humanised. Every one is more civil to us, and, by habit, to one another. However, the chaouches must, of course, get ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... of Christmas cheer would be incomplete without mention being made of Snap-dragon. It is an old sport, and is alluded to by Shakespeare in Henry IV., part ii. Act ii. sc. 4, where Falstaff says— ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Whisky seems to be a steady concomitant of civilization. As soon as the white settlers had planted themselves securely at Pittsburgh, they made requisition on Philadelphia for six thousand kegs of flour and three thousand kegs of whisky—a disproportion as startling as Falstaff's intolerable deal of sack to one half-penny-worth of bread. Congress, in 1791, passed an excise law to assist in paying the war debt. The measure was very unpopular, and its operation was forcibly resisted, particularly in Pittsburgh, which was noted then, as now, for the quantity ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... a club in London at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, the very tavern[681] where Falstaff and his joyous companions met; the members of which all assume Shakspeare's characters. One is Falstaff, another Prince Henry, another Bardolph, and so on. JOHNSON. 'Don't be of it, Sir. Now that you have a name, you must be careful to avoid many things, not bad in themselves, but which will lessen ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... 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 ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... incredulity of his hearers, he is liable to be rebuked with the remark, "So here we have Iagoo come again." And he seems to hold the relative rank in oral narration which our written literature awards to Baron Munchausen, Jack Falstaff, and Captain ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... were half battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Fernand. And, if many compared him to Falstaff, and many pitied the merry, fat old man for having fallen into so hard a profession, yet there were a few who called him a bloated spider, holding his victims, with invisible cords, and bleeding ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his dramas—in short, of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... a clown in one of the new uniforms! Sir Fret. Ha! ha! Sneer. That your occasional tropes and flowers suit the general coarseness of your style, as tambour sprigs would a ground of linsey-woolsey; while your imitations of Shakspeare resemble the mimicry of Falstaff's page, and are about as near the standard as the original. Sir Fret. Ha! Sneer. In short, that even the finest passages you steal are of no service to you; for the poverty of your own language prevents their assimilating; so that they lie on the surface like lumps ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... notion what Cuculain looked like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the horses' hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;—as I for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory's and Tennyson's well-groomed gentlemen ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... case of natural frailty, youthful precipitancy of passion, of all trespasses the most venial, where the final intentions are honorable. But in this case there seems to have been something more in motion than passion or the ardor of youth. "I like not," says Parson Evans, (alluding to Falstaff in masquerade,) "I like not when a woman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler." Neither do we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy who had still two ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... given to a dish of uncertain constituents. It is a curious coincidence that the obsolete chuet or chewet meant both a round pie and a jackdaw.[30] It is uncertain in which of the two senses Prince Hal applies the name to Falstaff (1 Henry IV., v. 1). It comes from Fr. chouette, screech-owl, which formerly meant also "a chough, daw, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... come out without a pair of iron garters to their hose. In those days all our plantations, and Jamaica most notably, were full of the very Scum and Riffraff of our English towns. 'Twas as though you had let Fleet Ditch, dead dogs and all, loose on a West-India Island. That Ragged Regiment which Falstaff in the Play would not march through Coventry with were at free quarters in Jamaica, leave alone the regular garrison of King's Troops, of which the private men were mostly pickpockets, poachers, and runaway ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... room and finding it full of Shakespeare's principal characters! What a babel of tongues! What a jostling of wits! How eagerly one's eye would go in search of Hamlet and Sir John Falstaff, but droop shudderingly at the thought of encountering the distraught gaze of Lady Macbeth! We should have no difficulty in recognising Beatrice in the central figure of that lively group of laughing ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... impudence and cynical distrust of virtue, the arrogant and 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?" "I am indeed, sir," is the reply. "I thought so; keep on thy hat, man, 't will be the less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... tells Falstaff, that the shirts she bought him were Holland at eight shillings a yard; a high price at this day, even supposing, what is not probable, that the best Holland at that time was equal in goodness to the best that can now be purchased. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... a club in London, at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, the very tavern where Falstaff and his joyous companions met; the members of which all assume Shakspeare's characters. One is Falstaff, another Prince Henry, another Bardolph, and so on. JOHNSON. 'Don't be of it, sir. Now that you have a name, you must be careful to avoid many things, not bad in themselves, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... greater number gave him the palm, with 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 of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... respects utterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness that was in other men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his metres, and Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must be apparent to ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... 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 it myself; but what will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... Why, what a rascal art thou, then, to praise him so for running! Falstaff. O' horseback, ye cuckoo! but a-foot, he will not budge a foot. P. Henry. Yes, Jack, upon instinct. Falstaff. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... references to the potato in 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; hail ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... there is to be found in musical annals such diversity of aptitudes as that displayed by this French baritone. Is there an actor on any stage to-day who can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago? Making allowance for the different art medium that the singing actor must work in, and despite the larger curves of operatic pose and gesture, Maurel kept astonishingly near to the characters he assumed. He was Shakespearian; his ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... him. Then he paused, his pencil in the air, and his eyes doubtfully fixed on the senator. For all this time Mr. Trevor had been fidgeting in his seat; but now he opened his long coat, button by button, and thrust his hand inside the flap. Oh, Falstaff! ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... young Major's boasting did not a whit reduce my estimate of his efficiency. For in America, swaggering does not necessarily indicate cowardice. I knew a Captain of artillery in Smith's division, who was wordier than Gratiano, and who exaggerated like Falstaff. But he was a lion in action, and at Lee's Mills and Williamsburg his battery ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 hath ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... Dinmont and Colonel Mannering wanting to speak to you, sir,' Pleydell turned his head, and blushed a little when he saw the very genteel figure of the English stranger. He was, however, of the opinion of Falstaff, 'Out, ye villains, play out the play!' wisely judging it the better way to appear totally unconcerned. 'Where be our guards?' exclaimed this second Justinian; 'see ye not a stranger knight from foreign parts arrived at this our court of Holyrood, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... prosperity, and no pickling in the sharp acids of adversity, can destroy it. It is a part of the Virginia character—just as the flavor is a distinctive part of the oyster—"which cannot, save by annihilating, die." It is no use talking about it—the thing may be right, or wrong;—like Falstaff's victims at Gadshill, it is past praying for: it is a sort of cocoa grass that has got into the soil, and has so matted over it, and so fibred through it, as to have become a part of it; at least there is no telling which is the grass and ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... direction, are 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 ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule holds,—[Greek: sunetois phonei], it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot's, or, as at other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Stubbs, taking down a volume of Shakspeare from his shelves, "depend upon it, I am borne out in my opinion, novel as it is, by the text of the immortal author himself; and I shall stuff the character when I play it. I maintain Hamlet ought to be"——"A Falstaff in little, I suppose," interrupted McCrab. "No," rejoined Stubbs, "he should not be exactly corpulent—but rather embonpoint, as the saying is—sleek—plumpish—in good condition ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... said the Major. "I feel like old Jack Falstaff sometimes, ready to say, 'If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I'm a soused gurnet.' ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... was that I desired to have the country furnished with a practical illustration of high-church patriotism and loyalty in the hour of need. The Church and the Patriot had boasted of their multitudes; but those multitudes shrivelled into a Falstaff's company in an hour which detected the difference between the loyalty of the lip and the heart.... The elongated countenances in certain quarters for a few days [in December, 1837], will never be forgotten! From the Government House to the poorest cottage the omnipotent power of the Guardian ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... have 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 coward, while many good ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Falstaff has received a commission from the King to raise a company of soldiers to fight in the King's battles. After drafting a number of well-to-do farmers, whom he knows will pay him snug sums of money rather than to serve under him, ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... was that I had seen him before. All of a sudden I remembered he was King Francis I. of France. I had hitherto thought the face of this king impossible, but when I saw it in play I understood it. His great contemporary Henry VIII. keeps a restaurant in Oxford Street. Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many years, and only retired when the railway was opened. Titian once made me a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones. At Modena I had my hair ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... Verdi's opera "Falstaff" presented at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, with Emma Eames, Zelie de Lussan, Scalchi, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... I always resided on my several visits here, kept by Mr. Crutenden; and if henceforward any stranger who relishes good fare, loves Shakspeare, and would choose to make the acquaintance of a Transatlantic Falstaff, passes through Albany without calling at the Eagle, and cracking a bottle with "mine host," he will have missed one of those days he would not have failed to mark ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... characters brought upon the stage still more interesting. I think Hotspur as much of a hero as Hector, and young Henry more of a man than Achilles; and then there is the fat knight, the quintessence of fun, wit, and rascality. Falstaff is a creation beyond the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... 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 his ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... gentlemen—Fortunately for me, and fortunately for you, it is the duty of the Chairman on an occasion of this nature, to be very careful that he does not anticipate those speakers who come after him. Like Falstaff, with a considerable difference, he has to be the cause of speaking in others. It is rather his duty to sit and hear speeches with exemplary attention than to stand up to make them; so I shall confine myself, in opening these proceedings as your business official, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... close of the second day in Canterbury, the two "toke" their inn at the sign of the "Falstaff," where hung "Honest Jack, in buff doublet and red hose," in a wonderful piece of wrought-iron work. Whether next day, after viewing the cathedral, the tricycles pursued their journey, is not told. The pilgrimage ends, as it should, at the shrine,—that is, where the shrine had been; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Chief Justice.[52] The public distrust of the administrators of 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 to prevent ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... separate from that of the chief characters—is, of course, recognized and productive of fine results. But, even in the five-act play, the use of double-action is dangerous. For instance: Shakespere developed Falstaff so humorously that today we sometimes carelessly think of "Henry IV" as a delightful comedy, when in reality it was designed as a serious drama—and is most serious, when Falstaff's lines are cut from the reading version to the right proportions ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... 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
... before. But even while the thought was passing through my head, Memnon was lying at my feet, flat as his equine rotundity would permit. Ashamed of my doubt, I lost not a moment in placing myself in the position suggested by Sir John Falstaff to Prince Hal for the defence of his own bulky carcase—astride the body of the animal, namely. At once he rose and lifted me into the natural relation of man and horse. Then he looked round at his master, and they set off ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... new behaviour?' 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.' ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... 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 contemporaries bewail him? Will genius change his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... conscience write as I do, because I know, which is more than thinking, that I write for a lawful established government, against anarchy, innovation, and sedition: but "these lies (as prince Harry said to Falstaff) are as gross as he that made them[25]." More I need not say, for I am accused without witness. I fear not any of their evidences, not even him of Salamanca; who though he has disowned his doctorship in Spain, yet there are some allow him to have taken a certain degree in Italy; a climate, they ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... looked upon him as a very clever fellow. 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 with the fool upon the stage, and he ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... ready-witted Rankine," of Adamhill, in Ayrshire, Burns kept up a will o'-wispish sort of a correspondence in rhyme, till the day of his death: these communications, of which this is one, were sometimes graceless, but always witty. It is supposed, that those lines were suggested by Falstaff's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... audience at pleasure to tears or to laughter. He could haunt their memories for years afterwards with the infinite tenderness of his ejaculation as Hamlet, of "The fair Ophelia!" He could convulse them with merriment by his hesitating utterance as Falstaff of "A shirt—and a half!" Incidentally it is remarked by the biographer of Henderson that the qualifications requisite to constitute a reader of especial excellence seem to be these, "a good ear, a voice capable of inflexion, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of the thirteenth century mentions that in his time the bagpipe was quite a fashionable instrument. Chaucer and Spenser both allude to it, and the former says, in Henry IV., that Falstaff was 'as melancholy as a lover's lute, or drone ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... prior to the invention of buttons, the femoral habiliments of men, or hose, as they were called, were fastened up by means of tags or points (Gallice) aiguillettes. Thus, Falstaff says, "Their points being cut, down fell their hose." From this French word aiguillette was derived the term nouer aiguillette (to tie up the points), equivalent to—button up the flap, to express the rendering, by enchantment, a husband incapable of performing ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... into. She would not like him to be a 'Jack Sheppard,' for fear he might break into some lady's heart with a crowbar of his impudence. Nor would she like him to be a 'Eugene Aram,' for fear he should make a mistake and hang her some night instead of himself. He seemed fitter for a 'Jack Falstaff' than anything else. But Falstaff was too witty for a hero, and she thought, perhaps, that if he laughed any more he would be only ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... had 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 London could he have ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... play-actor party who comes swarmin' into the hills while I'm thar to try the pine trees on his 'tooberclosis,' as he describes said malady, an' whose weakness is to saw off cognomens on everythin' he sees. As fast as he's introdooced to 'em, this actor sport names the Long's Canyon bull 'Falstaff'; the Red River five- year-old 'Hotspur,' bein' he's plumb b'lligerent an' allers makin' war medicine; while the little three-year-old, who inhabits about my camp in the Caliente, he addresses as 'Prince Hal.' The fool of a white steer that's worshippin' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... his ability to move the passions. Finally, throughout the last half of the century, as Bentley has shown, Shakespeare was admired above all English dramatists for his ability to create characters, of whom Falstaff was the most ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... 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 saying a ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... the editor (who applies to himself the words of Iago, 'I am nothing if I am not critical') overstepped the bounds of caution, and found himself seriously embroiled with the powers that were. There appeared in No. XVI. a most bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was compared to Falstaff, charged with puffing himself, and very prettily censured for publishing only the first volume of a class- book, and making all purchasers pay for both. Sir John Leslie took up the matter angrily, visited ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and I was interested to see that he was greatly alarmed. It was a very long time since we had spent a day out of London, and I said, on being coaxed back to calmness, that I wanted 'to go into the country'. Like the dying Falstaff, I babbled of green fields. My Father, after a little reflection, proposed to take me to Primrose Hill. I had never heard of the place, and names have always appealed directly to my imagination. I ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... you, under Falstaff's pasteboard cheeks and the sad disfigurement of his mates? There was no excess of scenery, Auberon says. Why, Falstaff's very person was nothing but scenery. A false face, a false figure, false hands, false legs—scarcely ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,— is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... representative feudal estate, we took Windsor as the representative palace, that which imbodies the English idea of royalty. Apart from this, Windsor has been immortalized by the Merry Wives; it has still standing in its park the Herne oak, where the mischievous fairies played their pranks upon old Falstaff. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... must here be committing an anachronism, in making Pentheus speak of 'tormenta,' who lived so many ages before that time. To commit anachronisms with impunity seems, however, to be the poet's privilege, from Ovid downwards to our Shakspere, where he makes Falstaff talk familiarly of the West Indies. We find the dictionaries giving 'tormentum' as the Latin word for 'cannon;' so that in this case we may say not that 'necessity is the mother of invention,' but rather that she ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Tarlton's "Jests" and his "Newes out of Purgatorie." 47 Glimpses of it are also to be caught through many of the humorous passages in Shakspeare. Dromio says of an excessively fat and greasy kitchen wench, "If she lives till doomsday she'll burn a week longer than the whole world!" And Falstaff, cracking a kindred joke on Bardolph's carbuncled nose, avows his opinion that it will serve as a flaming beacon to light lost souls the way to purgatory! Again, seeing a flea on the same flaming proboscis, the doughty knight ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... doubtful quality, like Falstaff's of old, but they were family heirlooms, and had been worn ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... me cut" meant 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
... higher. The best companion on the road to Stratford is Charles Knight's Life of Shakspeare, 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, whom we ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... of the second act of "Henry V.," a play written by an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describes the death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to need quotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thus ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... the assistance of CHARLES LAMB, cf. the Introduction. Frontispiece, Sir John Falstaff dancing to Master Brooks' fiddle, ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... is working in the minds of 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 Kansas with his ragged regiment, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... quietly at anchor in that neighborhood—of a woodcutter's axe. Sturdy were the blows, and steady the succession in which they followed: some even fancied they could hear that sort of groaning respiration which is made by men who use an axe, or by those who in towns ply the "three-man beetle" of Falstaff, as paviers; echoes they certainly heard of every blow, from the profound woods and the sylvan precipices on the margin of the shores; which, however, should rather indicate that the sounds were not supernatural, since, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... with the shadows of Tippoo Tib's* old stairway hiding her tale of years. But I felt my regard for her slipping downhill (and so, I rather think did Yerkes). "You look well, Lord Montdidier, trapesing about the earth with a leash of mongrels at your heel! Falstaff never picked up a more sordid-looking pack! What do you feed them—bones? Are there no young bloods left of your own class, that you need ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... is the effect on my mind of looking back at my three Thespian avatars—Falstaff at Cincinnati, Acres and Sir Anthony in Grand Ducal Florence, and Sir Anthony again in a liberated Tuscany! I seem to myself like some old mail-coach guard, who goes through the whole long journey, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... 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 ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... all these wonderful pictures. You may argue perhaps that that is untrue to the essential 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 ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... white gate, that hollow oak tree, which doubtless once belonged to the forest, and which now shewed in the moonlight its gaping rent; to whose fanciful appearance, tricked out by the dusk into a resemblance of the human form, the children had given the name of Falstaff;—all these objects were as well known to me as the cold hearth of my deserted home, and every moss-grown wall and plot of orchard ground, alike as twin lambs are to each other in a stranger's eye, yet to my accustomed gaze ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08—well, call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York Evening Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... prince, and the skull is a picture in the strongest sense picturesque. Caliban and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass's head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... part was still to be written. For a brief time just now this loses its historic character, but makes up for the loss by depicting admirably some traits in the mental constitution of the diarist. Tales of enchantment, he says, pleased his boyhood, but "the humors of Falstaff hardly affected me at all. Bardolph and Pistol and Nym were personages quite unintelligible to me; and the lesson of Sir Hugh Evans to the boy Williams was quite too serious an affair." In truth, no man can ever have been more utterly ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Summer, the drains furnish for them 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 ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... island to Jacmel, to communicate with another British force lying there. The man heard me with great patience; but when I looked round the circle of tatterdemalions, for there was ne'er a shirt in the whole company—Falstaff's men were a joke to them—with their bright arms sparkling to the red glare of the torches, that flared like tongues of flame overhead, while they grinned with their ivory teeth, and glared fiercely with their white eyeballs on us—I felt that ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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 of Touchstone ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... manu."[H] O! come here all ye young men! ye Billy Taylors for the world is full of you! ye deserters of true-lovers, ye walkers with ladies gay, come here and contemplate! Taylor, who a few days before was gay like you, is now alas "stone dead," or, to use the pathetic and expressive language of Falstaff—who by the by, was, like Billy, a gay deceiver—is now no better than a ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... already had noted: now he saw that the eyes of the real Inspector Sheffield were many shades lighter than those of the spurious; that the red face was heavier and more rounded. It was almost incredible, but not quite. He had seen Tree play Falstaff, and the art of Severac Bablon ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... this 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 the three country wenches as Dulcinea and her ladies in waiting. It is ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... boyhood's and young manhood's life. Here I heard the English actor, Anderson, in "Charles de Moor," and in the fine part of "Gisippus." Here I heard Fanny Kemble, Charlotte Cushman, the Seguins, Daddy Rice, Hackett as Falstaff, Nimrod Wildfire, Rip Van Winkle, and in his Yankee characters. (See pages 19, 20, "Specimen Days.") It was here (some years later than the date in the headline) I also heard Mario many times, and at his best. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... whole of the sixteen years he had been in office on this road. The three coupe passengers, consisting of two ladies—sisters—and a ruddy-faced, cheerful gentleman in a velvet travelling-cap, who made it a principle, like Falstaff, to take things easily, and "not to sweat extraordinarily," warmly approved the conductor's proposal as a sensible one; and even the alert gentleman in the banquette agreed that it would be more prudent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... 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 King ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... went into a church-yard, in the time of divine service, and Johnson laid himself down at his ease upon one of the tomb-stones. 'Now, Sir, (said Beauclerk) you are like Hogarth's Idle Apprentice.' When Johnson got his pension, Beauclerk said to him, in the humorous phrase of Falstaff, 'I hope you'll now purge and live ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... circles, consisting of the first and most 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 judgment on the individual who does no worse than ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... 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
... of six to five. Instead of being meagre, they are compactly built, with good busts, inclining to be full, and well-limbed, as any one may see who will take the trouble to walk the streets after a hard shower; for, as Falstaff told Prince Henry, "You are straight enough in the shoulders; you care not who sees your back." Indeed, I know no females to whom the opinion which we entertain of the French women may better apply than to our own, and yet I know none who ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 termagant into ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... who is as huge, though not so witty, as Falstaff. It is his custom when he travels to book two places, and thus secure half the inside to himself. He once sent his servant to book him to Glasgow. The man returned with the following pleasing intelligence: "I've booked you, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... midsummer days of 1885, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones was the life of every party. Wherever there was deviltry, there was Bill Jones, profane and obscene beyond description, but irresistibly comical. He was as lean and muscular as John Falstaff was short and fat, but the divergences between the genial old reprobate of Eastcheap and the saturnine, but by no means unlovable, rapscallion of Medora were less striking than the qualities they had in common. He had good friends, none better than the gay, infinitely pathetic ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... former days Could shape our talents to 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 often had recourse ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... dogmas and restrictions and littleness with which the great bare scheme has been enmeshed and clothed. The Methodist Church positively forbids Billy to play poker or drink, but it just as positively forbids him to see Pavlowa dance or Beerbohm Tree play Falstaff or Forbes Robertson incarnate Hamlet. And look at its wretched machinery—they allow a young man to give his life and expect inspiration from him at six hundred dollars a year with a wife and two dozen children, which he has been encouraged to bring down upon himself, dependent ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says, "dine with me to-day in my chamber, together with our worthy consul, Barclay, and that lump of universality, colonel Franks. But such a set of moneyless rascals have never appeared, since the epoch of the happy villain Falstaff. I have but five French crowns in the world; Franks has not a sol; and the Fitzhughs cannot get their tobacco money. Every day of my life," he continues, "is a day of expectation, and, consequently, a day of disappointment; whether I shall have a morsel of bread ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... divulged, and it is said that thirteen knights arrayed themselves in armor resembling the King's in order to mislead the assailants. The whole thirteen perished on that bloody field, where fat Sir John Falstaff vowed he fought on Henry's behalf "a long hour ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... his inferior. But let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was ambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the Second Part of Henry IV., a fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare's second manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise of sherris, act iv. scene iii.; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall please you to select—the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... actor as his only possible successor. On Iffland's death Devrient was summoned to Berlin, where he was for fifteen years the popular idol. He died there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the "demoniac ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... consider how pleasant a thing is mirth on the stage. Who does not thank William the Great for Falstaff, and Hackett for his personation of the fat knight? Who does not chuckle over the humors of Autolycus, rogue and peddler? Who has not felt his eye glisten, as his lips smiled, when Jesse Rural has spoken, and who will not say ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... Pepys. His stirring sea-fights, his tender love-stories, and delightful bits of domestic gossip, are really inimitable;—you actually live with the people he brings upon the stage, as intimately as you do with Falstaff, Percy, or Prince Hal; and there is something in the bearing of those old heroic figures who form his dramatis person, so grand and noble, that it is impossible to read the story of their earnest stirring lives without a feeling of almost passionate interest—an ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... conclusion. Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more significant than the immortality ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... is nothing here so nauseatingly indecent as the viler poems of the Rev. Robert Herrick and the Very Rev. the Dean of Dublin, Jonathan Swift, D.D. There are salacious hints, there are bawdy words, but no more than Falstaff or the wife of Bath or the Summoner or Tom Jones might have used—less, on the whole. There is no need, to borrow a phrase from the book's sequel, to "make use of the gesture of casting up the whites of the eyes." ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... we loved, and must have read in common, or at least at the same time: but others that I more especially liked were the Histories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaff appeared. This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy. I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph, and Nym. I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was a personal pang ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... attendance on a Sunday is about 3,000. There are three confessionals in the church, towards the south-eastern-corner; they stand out like small square boxes, and although made for everybody seem specially adapted for thin and Cassius-like people. Falstaff's theory was— more flesh more frailty. If this be so, then, there are either very few "great" sinners at St. Walburge's or the large ones confess somewhere else. The worshippers at this church are, in ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... time show that his health and appetite had mended during his residence at the Maison Despeaux:* (* Flinders' Papers.) "My appetite is so good that I believe it has the intention of revenging me on the Governor by occasioning a famine in the land. Falstaff says, 'Confound this grief, it makes a man go thirsty; give me a cup of sack.' Instead of thirsty read hungry, and for a cup of sack read mutton chop, and the words would fit me very well." The second passage is from his private journal, and may have been ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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 chambermaid. I had come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 deeply colors the imagination. When ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... 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 ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... earthy. Sly, selfish, sensual, his dreams are not of glory, but of good feeding. His only concern is for his carcass. His notions of honor appear to be much the same with those of his jovial contemporary Falstaff, as conveyed in his memorable soliloquy. In the sublime night-piece which ends with the fulling-mills—truly sublime until we reach the denouement—Sancho asks his master: "Why need you go about this adventure? It is main dark, and there is never a living soul sees us; we have nothing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... Shakespeare. 1744. William Warburton: Preface to Edition of Shakespeare. 1747. 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 Morgann. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Falstaff talketh of "minions of the moon;" and, truth to tell, two or three hundred years ago, nowhere was such an order of knighthood more prevalent than upon the Borders. Not only did the Scottish and English Borderers make their forays across the Tweed and the ideal line, but rival chieftains, though ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... us to the length of his iron chain, began barking very fiercely. Nor had we time to see half that we would gladly have seen and studied here and elsewhere about Shrewsbury. It would have been very interesting to have visited Hotspur's and Falstaff's battle-field, which is four miles from the town; too distant, certainly, for Falstaff to have measured the length of the fight by Shrewsbury clock. There is now a church, built there by Henry IV., and said to cover the bones of those slain ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 of most ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... all things are represented, as it were, in their solid form, and in the place which they occupied in a stormy and complicated civilization. In these dramas the comic element is introduced whenever its character of reality gives it the right of admission and the advantage of opportune appearance. Falstaff appears in the train of Henry V., and Doll Tear-Sheet in the train of Falstaff; the people surround the kings, and the soldiers crowd around their generals; all conditions of society, all the phases of human destiny appear by turns in juxtaposition, with the nature which properly belongs ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... father's belief and trust in his guests was not disappointed. But you shall have his own account of his success. "We had made a very pretty course," he wrote, "and taken great pains. Encouraged by the cricket matches' experience, I allowed the landlord of the Falstaff to have a drinking booth on the ground. Not to seem to dictate or distrust, I gave all the prizes in money. The great mass of the crowd were laboring men of all kinds, soldiers, sailors and navvies. They did not, between half-past ten, when we began, and sunset, displace ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... earlier dramatists, notably of Greene. Yet it is clear, from more than one passage, that the author was acquainted with Shakespeare's historical plays. Dick Bowyer's puns on the sentinels' names (ii. 1) were certainly suggested by Falstaff's pleasantries with the recruits in Henry IV., Part II. Winstanley absurdly ascribes the piece to William Wager, who flourished (?) when Shakespeare was a child. If I were obliged to make a guess at the authorship, I would name Chettle or Munday, or both. It is not altogether improbable that ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... 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 Lincoln and Cameron. I refused to take such a certificate, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... orders and characters use all the forms. Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Coriolanus, Lance, use prose; Leontes and his little boy, Lear, Coriolanus, and his domestics—to say nothing of the Steward—Macbeth and his murderlings, use blank verse. Even Falstaff, now and then, a verse. All, high and low, wise, merry, and sad, rhyme. Fools, witches, fairies—we know not who else—use lyrical measures. Upon the whole, the uttermost—that is, the musical form—answers herein to the innermost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... 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 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 side, as it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... nor for scholarly arguments to prove learning; all that is required is to prove adherence to common nature and common rationality. This is the ground upon which Anonymous stands, and it is the ground upon which Morgann is to stand when he gives us the "Falstaff of Nature," and Johnson when he presents Shakespeare as the dramatist who is "above all modern writers the poet of nature," whose "persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions by which all minds are agitated," whose "drama is the mirror of life," in which his readers may find ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... our lunch one Sunday at the east end of the long room in the Sir John Falstaff Inn, Gadshill, we overheard some waterside- looking dwellers in the neighbourhood talking among themselves. I ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... "now I will ask nobody more; the number grows just as with Falstaff; here stands one who asserts that there was only one ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... during their 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, their fame will be established in after ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... now 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
... smoke, sitting in an easy chair, 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 his physiognomy. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... your correspondents skilled in Shakspearian lore inform me whence Shakspeare took the names Poins and Bardolph for the followers of Prince Hal and Falstaff? ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various |
