"Falstaff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... committee was in progress. "These fellows would make you weep if you knew as much about them as I do. There's one of the bright lights now—the Honorable Ike Pettit, of Fraser. The Honorable Ike isn't smart enough to be crooked; he's the bellowing Falstaff of the Hoosier Democracy. I wonder who the laugh's on just now; he's shaking like a jelly ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... keeping his relatives—they were almost constantly dying on him and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking old Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Coming down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than the White House at Washington—but have we not enough examples without becoming personal? Yes, ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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
... frequent and steady patron of the Drama, especially as its interests were represented by "the Lord Chamberlain's servants." Everybody, no doubt, has heard the tradition of her having been so taken with Falstaff in King Henry the Fourth, that she requested the Poet to continue the character through another play, and to represent him in love; whereupon he wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. Whatever embellishments may have been added, there is nothing incredible in the substance of the tradition; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... 'have a busy time of it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were marching by; and garden fruit and vegetables, of course, share the results produced by a rigid application of the maxim, that la propriete c'est la vol. Where these people come from is a puzzle. There will be vagrants and strollers among ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... maintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital 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 every one,—and also that his genius and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Inn 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 passed this ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... letters; but in several searches I cannot find it. To his mother he speaks of the book as "grand and melancholy", and to Lady Stanley as of "cut-throat melancholy". It is said to have been sold for a thousand pounds—the same sum that Master Shallow lent Falstaff on probably inferior security. Those who knew thought well of it—which is ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... airy nothings, conjured up by poetic power; yet which, to me, had all the charm of reality. I had heard Jacques soliloquize beneath his oak; had beheld the fair Rosalind and her companion adventuring through the woodlands; and, above all, had been once more present in spirit with fat Jack Falstaff, and his contemporaries, from the august Justice Shallow down to the gentle Master Slender, and the sweet ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... the White Horse had been a poem about English legends and origins. The History too was called a poem by the reviewers. And it was. It was a poem about Falstaff and Sam Weller and even the Artful Dodger who in so many British colonies had turned into Robinson Crusoe. His rulers had tried to educate him, they had tried to Germanize him and to teach him "to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... an old proverb, that whoso goes to Westminster for a wife, to St Paul's for a man, and to Smithfield for a horse, may meet with a whore, a knave, and a jade. Falstaff, on being informed that Bardolph is gone to Smithfield to buy him a horse, observes, "I bought him in Paul's, and he'll buy me a horse in Smithfield; an I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived." Second Part of Henry ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... something new for Mdlle. Milder.[3] Meanwhile it is a consolation to me to hear that Y.R.H. is so much better. I hope I am not too sanguine in thinking that I shall soon be able to contribute towards this. I have taken the liberty to apprise my Lord Falstaff[4] that he is ere long to have the ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... 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
... crossed the Pedee River and was pushing southward. During its march a circumstance occurred which gave great amusement to the trim soldiery. There joined the army a volunteer detachment of about twenty men, such a heterogeneous and woe-begone corps that Falstaff himself might have hesitated before enlisting them. They were a mosaic of whites and blacks, men and boys, their clothes tatters, their equipments burlesques on military array, their horses—for they were all mounted—parodies on the noble war-charger. At the head of this motley array ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... man who kills him says a few trite lines over his body, and leaves the stage talking of Falstaff's bowels. ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... knife, or Highland sword, Your words have hewn and hack'd me; Whilst Quin, a rebel to his lord, Like his own Falstaff back'd me. ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... 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 out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 is 'the parent ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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 awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is predurable because he is not completed. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... to love is by no means so remarkable as we might at first imagine. We quote Jack Falstaff in proof of this, or, if the reader be disposed to reject our authority, then we quote Ancient Pistol himself—both of whom we consider as the most finished specimens of heroism that ever carried a safe skin. Acres would have been a hero had ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... 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 sex to weep? I would ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... disgust of the hero; all the circumstances in the Tartuffe are calculated to shew the treachery of an accomplished hypocrite. I am sorry that no English writer of comedy can be produced as a rival to Moliere: although it must be confessed, that Falstaff and Morose are two admirable characters, excellently, supported and displayed; for Shakespear has contrived all the incidents to illustrate the gluttony, lewdness, cowardice, and boastfulness of the fat old knight: and Jonson, has, with equal art, displayed the oddity of a wimsical ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... ... palpable ... grosse ... mountaine." The writer had surely in his mind Prince Hal's words to Falstaff:—"These lies are like their father that begets them: gross as a mountain, ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... 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 imperatives? Seeking coal ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... 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
... train him 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 so ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... lush young England dissipate. 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... shall I meet him!" I was plunged at once into the profoundest gloom. Why had I undertaken the business at all? This interference, this good-humor, this readiness to oblige,—it would ruin me yet! I forswore it, as Falstaff forswore honor. Why needed I to meddle in the melee? Why—But I was no catechumen. Questions were useless now. My emotions are not chronicled on my face, I flatter myself; and with my usual repose I saluted our hostess. Greeting G. without any allusion to the diamond, the absence ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... place, when Falstaff began to "play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends," it was no far-fetched thought to place him in fancy among green fields; and if the disputed passage were in immediate connexion with the above, the argument in its favour ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... sound, Chanticleer objects to the note of Chanticleer, and the more articulate human being is rasped by the voice of his neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad Boeotian speech. Parson Evans's "seese and putter" were the bitterest ingredients in Falstaff's dose of humiliation. "Yankee twang" and "Southern drawl" incited as ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... the Wriothesleys, Earls of Southampton, one of whom was the celebrated friend of Shakspeare. But what have we not omitted also? No less an illustrious head than the Boar's, in Eastcheap—the Boar's Head Tavern, the scene of Falstaff's revels. We believe the place is still marked out by a similar sign. But who knows not Eastcheap and the Boar's Head? Have we not all been there time out of mind? And is it not a more real, as well as notorious thing to us, than the London Tavern, or the Crown and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... an end to, does not appear. It was here that sir Nicholas Throgmorton held a conference with an emissary of Wyat's; it was here that one of the bravoes engaged in the noted murder of Arden of Feversham was hired. It was in Paul's that Falstaff is made to say ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is that pretty face! Thy cheek all on fire, and thy hair all uncurled: Prithee quit this caprice; and (as old Falstaff says), Let us e'en talk a little like folks ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... only for arms, at once on an effective war-footing. Blankets, tents and clothing were captured in bulk; nor were they to be despised by soldiers who had left home with knapsacks as empty as those of Falstaff's heroes. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... his present, between one's duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word, his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff, and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by a clown. Here is an ignoramus, and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might, indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... 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
... 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 cleanly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... inconvenient, to what may be called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs. Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy on them. In this sense only it ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... hair-brained cox-combs which you call heroes, and persons of honour. I remember just such another fuming Achilles in Shakespeare, one ancient Pistol, whom he avows to be a man of so fiery a temper, and so impatient of an injury, even from Sir John Falstaff his captain, and a knight, that he not only disobeyed his commands about carrying a letter to Mrs. Page, but returned him an answer as full of contumely, and in as opprobrious terms, as ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Brown came in this evening just to barter small talk, as we often do. Now, in physical build Brown is somewhere between Falstaff and Cassius, while in mental qualities he is an admixture of Plato, Solomon, and ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... 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 up ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... Cross Road, where there still beat the heart from which Fielding and Dickens had drawn their inspiration, the brave heart that could laugh through all its sufferings and through all the indignities put upon it. In Charing Cross Road he could meet almost any day Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, Tom Jones and Partridge, Sam Weller and Sairey Gamp, and every day their descendants walked abroad, passed in and out of shops, went about their business, little suspecting that they would be translated ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... of the fun. But they are all under guard. The moment they pass a certain boundary and break into reality, the moment that intemperance leads to disorder, and vice to suffering, as in real life, then suddenly Harry turns upon Falstaff, or Olivia on Sir Toby, and vice is ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... this view Subaltern Iago is an attack on the army, Sir John Falstaff an attack on knighthood, and King Claudius an attack on royalty. Here again the clamor for naturalness and human feeling, raised by so many critics when they are confronted by the real thing on the stage, is really a clamor for the most mechanical and superficial sort of logic. The dramatic ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... exit. They sent him to Halifax, they sent him to Coventry. They flourished things at his head, amid an uproar of jolly hootings, and took aim at him—"Ping! Ping!"—and pinched him, as the Merry Wives did Falstaff in Windsor Forest. And they slipped off their shoes in honor of his wedding, by Jove! And Trampy fled under a shower of boots and slippers, fled like mad, as though ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... enough to bear him, and, if such a steed were not in stables, would walk the distance swingingly. He is a man of action, a fighter, an insolent dominator of men and women. In fact, he is merely a stout man—uniform with Porthos, and Arthur Orton, and Sir John Falstaff; spiced, like them, with charlatanism and braggadocio, and not the less a fine fellow for that. Indeed, such bulk as his and theirs is in the same kind as that bulk which, lesser in degree, is indispensable to greatness in practical affairs. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... hurts' might have followed, but just as I finished, my boss came in, and commanded the party to leave his premises, with an assurance that he would not suffer me to be molested. The leader, who seemed as much ashamed of his followers as Falstaff was of his ragged regiment, immediately beat a retreat, and his troop with him; one or two, as they went out, declaring that they would 'hammer' me whenever they caught me in the street. I, however, went and came as usual, and for some reason—perhaps ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... enemies had sworn to single him out in battle. The plot was 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 by ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Ivanhoe was suggested by an old rhyme. All novelists have had occasion at some time or other to wish with Falstaff, that they knew where a commodity of good names was to be had. On such an occasion the author chanced to call to memory a rhyme recording three names of the manors forfeited by the ancestor of the celebrated ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... scull-cap, white or red, and others are bare-headed. I laughed when I surveyed with my inexperienced eye these grisly, skeleton, phantom troops, and thought of the splendid invincible guard which the Pasha promised me. And yet amongst these wretched beings was riding sublime an Arab Falstaff. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... an appreciable amount of agilita, the performance of modern music is laboured and heavy; that of the classics, impossible. In fact, virtuosity, if properly understood, is as indispensable to-day as ever it was. As much vocal virtuosity is required to interpret successfully the music of Falstaff, in Verdi's opera, as is necessary for Maometto Secondo or Semiramide by Rossini. It is simply another form of virtuosity; that is all. The lyric grace or dramatic intensity of many pages of Wagner's music-dramas can be fully revealed only through a voice ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... of these was his schoolfellow James (familiarly Jem) White. This youth, who at the beginning of this period was his most frequent companion, had great cleverness and abundant animal spirits, under the influence of which he had produced a small volume, entitled "Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends." These letters were ingenious imitations of the style and tone of thought of the celebrated Shakespearian knight and his familiars. Beyond this merit they are, perhaps, not sufficiently ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... love is by no means so remarkable as we might at first imagine. We quote Jack Falstaff in proof of this; or, if the reader be disposed to reject our authority, then we quote Ancient Pistol himself—both of whom we consider as the most finished specimens of heroism that ever carried a safe skin. Acres would have been a hero had he worn gloves to ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... who will deny this, but there are people who will deny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this. 'Every man,' said Dr. Johnson, 'has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right to knock him ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... fellow-creatures. How often are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters, but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... opera like Mozart's, and now I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after the first performance of "Der Rosenkavalier." But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almost antipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger" or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... not badly carried out; Prince Henry, when he did not giggle, acted beautifully; and Falstaff really did very well, though his eyes were often directed downwards, and the curious, by standing on tiptoe, obtained not only a view of Prince Hal's pink petticoat, but of a great Shakespeare laid open on the floor; and a very low bow on the part of the heir apparent, when about to ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... second to the Doctor in real authority, was Mr. Winterblossom; a civil sort of person, who was nicely precise in his address, wore his hair cued, and dressed with powder, had knee-buckles set with Bristol stones, and a seal-ring as large as Sir John Falstaff's. In his heyday he had a small estate, which he had spent like a gentleman, by mixing with the gay world. He was, in short, one of those respectable links that connect the coxcombs of the present day with those of the last age, and could compare, in his own experience, the follies of both. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... your children have that of rebellion. Oh that I could but live to be governor here, to make your fat guts pledge me in that beverage I drunk, you Sir John Falstaff ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... not ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man is the paragon ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Shakspeare's momentary humour, when he put it into Falstaff's mouth to ask what honour is "to him that died o' Wednesday." It is a humour that won't last—'tis against nature—man is more than half belligerent, and has a "murder" in him (to give it a bad name) "that will out." Even ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... History of Quatremer's deportation. He presumed, in the Council of Five Hundred, to arraign Madame de Stael's conduct, and even to hint a doubt of her sex. He was sent to 'Guyana'. The transaction naturally brings to one's mind the dialogue between Falstaff and Hostess Quickly in Shakespeare's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... then coolly—as though it were a pure matter of business—he put in juxtaposition the enactments of the Bill, and the contrast was as laughter provoking with all its deadly seriousness, as the conflict between the story of Falstaff and the contemptuously quiet rejoinder of Prince Hal. Lord Randolph was taken in hand; he was soon disposed of. Then Mr. Dunbar Barton was crumpled up and flung away. Sir Edward Clarke ventured an interruption; he was crushed in a sentence. It was an admirable ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... closing of all shop-doors, and the shutting up of all slaves, on an alarm that the enemy was attacking the town to the southward. The officer leading the party was indeed dressed en militaire, with a drawn sword in one hand, and a pistol in the other. Then followed a company that Falstaff would hardly have enlisted, armed in a suitable manner, with such caps and hats as became the variety of trades to which the wearers belonged, the rear being brought up by a most singular figure, with a ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... our other friends, how strange and unnatural they seemed. Their most intimate friends would scarcely have recognized them. Margaret was a fat, jolly Falstaff, stuffed out to immense proportions. Edith was entirely disguised as a jester and enjoyed her own quips immensely when she tapped a visitor on the shoulder with her bauble and said, "Good morrow, fair maid, art looking for ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... charming loquacity of Mr. 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 ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Macbeth and Richard, Juliet, and Othello, and others,) the want of comparative power is only an additional excellence; but to go to an opposite extreme of delineation, we must allow that there is not one of Shakspeare's women that, as a dramatic character, can be compared to Falstaff. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... 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 ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... England; and it was in this year that his first English opera, the "Siege of Rochelle," was produced. It was played continuously at Drury Lane for over three months. In 1836 appeared his "Maid of Artois;" in 1837, "Catharine Grey" and "Joan of Arc;" and in 1838, "Falstaff." During these years he was still singing in concerts and opera, and in 1840 appeared as manager of the Lyceum. His finest works were produced after this date,—"The Bohemian Girl" in 1843; "The Enchantress" in 1844; "The Rose of Castile," "La Zingara," and "Satanella" ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... VI., his two murdered nephews: then came forth the unhappy Jane Shore, pale, exhausted, and starving; no one daring to offer a mouthful of food to save the poor wretch from death. But the scene changes. It is night; and I see Falstaff and his companions at the rising of the moon, 'by whose light they steal.' They go forth and are lost sight of in the misty shadows of those dark, time-worn buildings; and anon we hear him waging battle with the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... 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, if a visual ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... desire that somebody shall hint that there is something peculiar; and which is shocked and retreats backwards into its boots when anything like a consequence forces itself on the apprehension. Such men have their glory in their own estimation. We remember how Falstaff flouted the pride of his companion whose victory in the fields of love had been but little glorious. But there are victories going now-a-days so infinitely less glorious, that Falstaff's page was a Lothario, a very Don Juan, in comparison with the heroes whose praises are ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... a humorist or song-writer or publisher that I wish to portray him, but as an odd, lovable personality, possessed of so many interesting and peculiar and almost indescribable traits. Of all characters in fiction he perhaps most suggests Jack Falstaff, with his love of women, his bravado and bluster and his innate good nature and sympathy. Sympathy was really his outstanding characteristic, even more than humor, although the latter was always present. One might recite ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 kissing-comfits, and ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... 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 ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... went below a slight-built, thin-looking man, bearing a closer resemblance to Shakespeare's portrait of Prince Hal than to that of Falstaff. When, fifteen minutes afterwards, he appeared on deck, staggering under the load of three pairs of trousers, an equal number of vests, covering half a dozen shirts, with two or three silk kerchiefs around his neck, he looked, from his chin downwards, more like the "fat knight" ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers and ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... Mountague, she felt much in doubt how to behave towards him. Mademoiselle boasted often of the well-bred instinct, by which she could immediately distinguish "un homme comme il faut" from any other; yet sometimes, like Falstaff's, her instinct was fallacious. Recollecting that Lady S—— had sent for an apothecary, she took it into her head that Mr. Mountague was this apothecary. "Miladi is not visible yet, sir," said she; "does she know you ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... from the "Recessional." Of the great novelists Dickens was easily his first favourite; a long way behind came Scott, Stevenson and Jules Verne. Dickens he knew and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... which has comprehended the sea. I saw there the very wheel of the Spray, the cockboat in which the regretted Slocum wafted himself round the world! I sat in an arm-chair which would have suited Falstaff, and whose tabular arms would have held all Falstaff's tankards, and gazed through a magnified port-hole at a six-masted schooner as it crossed the field of vision! And I had never even dreamed that a six-masted schooner existed! It was with difficulty that I ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... 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 the height ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the petals of the cuckoo-buds in the river-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as he lies a' dying, "babble o' green fields," and all the long, long thoughts of youth steal over us, like ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... which did so much to alienate many from the Church found strong illustrations in the worldliness which seemed to settle down awhile on St. Paul's and its services. Clergymen appeared here to be hired (Chaucer's Prologue), and lawyers met their clients. Falstaff "bought Bardolph at Paul's." But before we come to the great changes, it will be well to go back and take note of the surroundings of the cathedral, and also to stroll through the interior, seeing that ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... abandoned long ago by wild pirates of the southern seas; for clinging to the rigging, and jovially cheering as the ship went down, I made out a man with blazing eyes, clad in a velveteen jacket. As the ship disappeared from sight, Falstaff rushed to the rescue of the lonely navigator—and stole his purse! But Miranda persuaded him to give it back. Stevenson said, "Who steals my purse steals trash." Falstaff laughed and called this a good joke, as good as any he had heard ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... ordinary circumstances the disproportion would have been fatal. But the captives, besides having been deprived of all means of offense, had no exact knowledge of the exact number of men who had trapped them. Their fears and the darkness had a magnifying effect, and, like Falstaff, they would have sworn that their enemies were ten times as many as ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... have the hard 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... measures had been seasonably taken; but they now became critical elements in the decision to be made. And Hooker, despite his well-earned reputation as a fighting man, was unable to arrive at any other than the conclusion which Falstaff so cautiously enunciated, from beneath his shield, at the battle of Shrewsbury, that "the better part ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... relative to appointments to office, Mr. Adams answered: "My system has been, and continues to be, to nominate for reaeppointment all officers, for a term of years, whose commissions expire, unless official or moral misconduct is charged and substantiated against them. This does not suit the Falstaff friends 'who follow for the reward;' and I am importuned to serve my friends, and reproached for neglecting them, because I will not dismiss, or drop from executive favor, officers faithful and able, because they are my political opponents, to provide ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... use it, and thus we pass from the pompous grandiloquence of king and herald to the common English and coarse conceits of clown and nurse and grave-digger; from the bombastic speech of Glendower and the rhapsodies of Hotspur to the slang and jests of Falstaff. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... like the 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
... 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 ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... often trip it along with the appearance and gesture of a spruce milliner; and I would often stalk with the solemn air and sweeping train of a duchess. But of all the infinite shapes of human dress, I must confess that, my favourite is the kind of doublet that prince Harry wore when he assaulted Falstaff. The nearer it approaches to the guise of a common carman the better, and his long whip ought to be inseparable. If you could add to it the sooty appearance of a coal-heaver, or a chimney-sweep, it would sit, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... says the tunics of the Tartars were "bacramo," or else of baudichin (cloth of gold). Falstaff's "men in ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... The ass 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
... more owing to that, than to any superior knowledge or merit of my own. Apropos, the word PLEASING puts one always in mind of Lady Hervey; pray tell her, that I declare her responsible to me for your pleasing; that I consider her as a pleasing Falstaff, who not only pleases, herself, but is the cause of pleasing in others; that I know she can make anything of anybody; and that, as your governess, if she does not make you please, it must be only because she will not, and not because ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... least, that this actor used to relate with much unction after a visit which he once paid to Dublin. The hero of the affair was an Irishman, named Baker, who relieved the monotony of his work as a master pavior by acting Sir John Falstaff and other parts. When he was in the streets, overseeing the labours of his men, this pavior-artist usually rehearsed one of his characters, muttering the lines, gesticulating, and almost forgetting that he was without the sacred walls of a theatre. The workmen soon got accustomed to these out-of-door ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... he makes men talk the way they do in life. I reckon he couldn't get printed to-day. It's a right down shame Shakespeare couldn't know about poker. He'd have had Falstaff playing all day at that Tearsheet outfit. And the Prince would have ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... worn down society into a more smooth and polished, but certainly a less characteristic surface. Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and, like the sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators. They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously: times wild and picturesque, which have furnished ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... in your absence; though we had rather you were present to witness and share our exceeding great joy; and then to commence our Thirteenth Volume. Pardon this exuberance of the season: we reason with Falstaff:—"If then the tree may be known by the fruit, as the fruit by the tree, then, peremptorily I speak it, there is virtue in that Falstaff: him keep with; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various
... in this rollicking locality could furnish, long before The Boar made the acquaintance of Falstaff, every species of delicacy and bonne bouche to their constituents, and the revelry was apt sometimes to extend to an unseasonable hour. In an early naval song we meet with ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... 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 done better than take up Conan ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large and unctuous, trickled ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... 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. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the descendants of the houses of genuine loyalty, Mordaunts, Granvilles, and Stanleys, whose names were to be found in that military record; and, calling up all his feelings of family grandeur and warlike glory, he concluded, with logic something like Falstaff's, that when war was at hand, although it were shame to be on any side but one, it were worse shame to be idle than to be on the worst side, though blacker than usurpation could make it. As for Aunt Rachel, her scheme had not exactly ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... was shoving off and bowed and waved my hat, and I parted on the most amiable terms from those heroes, so like the ragged regiment headed by the redoubtable Sir John Falstaff. ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... was born 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. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... proved his accuracy by showing me it was but a quarter-past seven. In the days I remember they would have kept it up till day-light; nor do I think poor Don would have left the chair before midnight. Well, there is a medium. Without being a veteran Vice, a grey Iniquity, like Falstaff, I think an occasional jolly bout, if not carried to excess, improved society; men were put into good humour; when the good wine did its good office, the jest, the song, the speech, had double effect; men were happy for the night, and better friends ever after, because they ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... unknown to the same feature now-a-days. It was adapted to practical utility, in its application to domestic purposes, and moral instruction, by that great admirer and competent judge of its virtues, Sir John Falstaff, to whose sheets it did the office of a warming-pan;[7] and who made as good use of it as some men do of a death's head, or a memento mori: "I never see it," said he, "but I think upon hell fire." It stands almost unrivalled in history, and ranks at least with that which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... some Dutch Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at the man. They talked for a while together through the window; the man seemed to have been asking money. "Ye ken the last time," she said, "I gave ye two shillin's for your ludgin', and ye said——" it died off into whisper. Plainly Falstaff and Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed unpleasantly, even cruelly, and said something; and the woman turned her back on the carriage and stood a long while so, and, do what I might, I could catch no glimpse ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... word. What is Heaven? A word—a phantasy. A vaporish place, too delicate and subtle for such fun-loving, corpulent specimens of the Creator's wisdom as old Jack Falstaff. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... subsequent additions he made to the poem. In these scenes are already clearly defined the two figures, Faust and Mephistopheles, which have their place in the world's gallery of imaginative creations beside Ulysses and Don Quixote, Hamlet and Falstaff; and there, too, in all her essential lineaments, we have Gretchen, the most moving of all the births of a poet's mind and heart. And, besides these three works of universal interest, there belong to the same period a series of productions—plays, lyrics, essays—which, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... yourself. Heroes are not always thin. Hamlet was fat and scant of breath. I can see you as Hamlet, whereas to cast you for Falstaff would be ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... 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
... various other gelatinous viands for the purpose of acquiring, as they suppose, a proper degree of corpulency[61], which is considered by them as respectable and imposing upon the multitude; of a great portion of whom it may be observed, as Falstaff said of his company, "No eye hath seen such scare-crows." It would be rare to find, among the commonalty of China, one to compare with a porter-drinking citizen or a jolly-looking farmer of England. They are ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... also. Alas! the fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the 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 on ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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
... during this same decade upon the irreligious education of the children of their countrymen! Were the truth attainable, the amount expended by them would be found to bear to the amount received by them from their propaganda of unbelief much less than the proportion of Falstaff's 'pennyworth of bread' to his 'intolerable deal of sack!' While the Catholics of France have been giving millions to defend the right of the French people to protect the faith of their children, these men have been expending hundreds of millions of the money of Catholic taxpayers ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... He inserts his lank fathom of a man into a suit of molasses-colored homespun. Frowzy and husky is the hair Nature crowns him with; frowzy and stubby the beard. He shambles in his walk. He drawls in his talk. He drinks whiskey by the tank. His oaths are to his words as Falstaff's sack to his bread. I have seen Maltese beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars, New-York aldermen, Digger Indians; the foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... managed; and nothing could exceed the unction with which he related his encounter with the villains. In fact, upon Falstaff's principle, he had discharged his pistols on the way home, as a proof of the desperate contest he had had with the blood-thirsty scoundrels. Like all his other exploits, however, it was added ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... was a London street, named Bucklersbury (near the present Mansion House), noted for its number of druggists who sold Simples and sweet-smelling herbs. We read, in [ix] The Merry Wives of Windsor, that Sir John Falstaff flouted the effeminate fops of his day as "Lisping hawthorn buds that smell like Bucklersbury ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... their extravagance and their frolics? What a wild rogue was that Prince Harry, son of the austere sovereign who robbed Richard the Second of his crown,—the youth who took purses on Gadshill, frequented Eastcheap taverns with Colonel Falstaff and worse company, and boxed Chief Justice Gascoigne's ears! What must have been the venerable Queen Charlotte's state of mind when she heard of the courses of her beautiful young Prince; of his punting at gambling-tables; of his dealings with horse-jockeys; of his awful ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lend 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Player's melancholy plight,— Falstaff in tears, Othello deadly white,— Poor Romeo reckoning what his doublet cost, And Juliet whimpering for her dresses lost,— Their wardrobes burned, their salaries all undrawn, Their cues cut ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... is entitled "Songs without Tears." These are for a bass voice, and by all odds the best of his songs. An appropriate setting is Edmund Clarence Stedman's "Falstaff's Song," a noteworthy lyric of toss-pot moralization on death. His song of "Joy" is exuberant with spring gaiety, and some of his best manner is seen in his "Elegie," for violin and piano. He has also written a ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... he said he had but once before encountered during the 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 to remain at the first good inn the diligence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... reposes in the trifler. The character is great, original, and just.' Johnson's criticism is true. There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day. He had the courage to ring his ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... states very clearly the catholic and comprehensive ground which all philosophy must take that would save itself from dangerous error. The philosopher must start from the complete living totality of man, formed as he is, not of flesh merely, a Falstaff—or of spirit merely, a Simon Pillarman and Total Abstinence Saint—but of both flesh and spirit, body and soul, in his healthy and normal condition. For this reason clearly—true philosophy is not merely sense-derived ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... perhaps is none too wide, And hardly fit for royal Richard's stride, Or Falstaff's ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses at Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of Poins and Falstaff." The terrors of one generation become the sources of romance and amusement to later times. Four hundred years ago we should have regarded William of Deloraine as an extremely commonplace and inconvenient personage: he is now much ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... crow of cocks; the time seemed interminable; but when daylight came, I landed, and found a pair of scarlet trousers pacing on their beat before every house in the village, and a small squad of prisoners, stunted and forlorn as Falstaff's ragged regiment, already hi hand. I observed with delight the good demeanor of my men towards these forlorn Anglo-Saxons, and towards the more tumultuous women. Even one soldier, who threatened to throw an old termagant into the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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. In like manner, a yard of velvet, about the middle of Elizabeth's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... used to remind me of Wollett's beautiful engraving of a scene in the Maid of the Mill. It will be long before any artist will make a drawing of this. Only think of this redness in a picture! this boiled lobster of a house! Falstaff's description of Bardolph's nose would look pale in ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... 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
... the final act of the "Merry Wives of Windsor" could not be played, because during the intermission Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly had got into a fight, and the lady had scratched a huge piece of skin from ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... aware, to the taste of his age, were amply compensated by his being called upon, and, as it were, compelled, by the nature of his audience, to rouse them with his thunder, and to melt them with his dew. I question much if the age of Charles II. would have borne the introduction of Othello or Falstaff. We may find something like Dryden's self-complacent opinion expressed by the editor of Corneille, where he civilly admits, "Corneille etoit inegal comme Shakespeare, et plein de genie comme lui: mais le genie ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... of "Mr. Dinmont and Colonel Mannering wanted 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—with our bold yeoman Andrew Dinmont, who has succeeded ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... that I am utterly unable to see its point and therefore cannot, of course, trace its connection with the subject. Falstaff, it is true, speaks of the "horn of abundance," but then he assigns it to the husband, and makes the "lightness of the wife shine through it." (K. Henry IV. Act i. Sc. 2., on ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... destroyed. Several of the rioters were arrested, tried and convicted. The trials of some of them are now before me. How deeply Fleet was implicated in these disturbances was never known, but being of the same mind with Jack Falstaff, that "the better part of valor is discretion," thought it prudent to put the Ocean between himself and danger. He made his way to this country and arrived in Boston, 1712. Being a man of some enterprise he soon established ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Henry Percy, his son. Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. Scroop, Archbishop of York. Sir Michael, his Friend. Archibald, Earl of Douglas. Owen Glendower. Sir Richard Vernon. Sir John Falstaff. Pointz. Gadshill. ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... creative force. His sympathy is universal, and therefore so is his interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Rochester quaintly mentions the principal interest of the locality. "Near the twenty-seventh stone from London is Gadshill, supposed to have been the scene of the robbery mentioned by Shakespeare in his play of Henry IV; there being reason to think also that it was Sir John Falstaff, of truly comic memory, who under the name of Oldcastle inhabited Cooling Castle of which the ruins are in the neighbourhood. A small distance to the left appears on an eminence the Hermitage the seat of the late Sir Francis Head, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never found the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has idealized itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Let us suppose that one of the stupid, salamander-like Labyrinthodonts, which pottered, with much belly and little leg, like Falstaff in his old age, among the coal- forests, could have had thinking power enough in his small brain to reflect upon the showers of spores which kept on falling through years and centuries, while perhaps not one in ten million fulfilled its apparent purpose, and reproduced ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... will deny—certainly no man who is past forty-five, and whose digestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef and mutton which are the boast of a British kitchen, and to prefer, with Justice Shallow, and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff also, "any pretty little tiny kickshaws"—no man, I say, who has reached that age, but will feel it a practical comfort to him to know that the young ladies of his family are at all events good cooks; and understand, as the French do, thrift in the ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... imagination, built up an outward world from the stores within his mind, as the bee finds a hive from a thousand sweets gathered from a thousand flowers. He was not only a great poet but a great philosopher. Richard III., Iago, and Falstaff are men who reverse the order of things, who place intellect at the head, whereas it ought to follow, like Geometry, to prove and to confirm. No man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive; for let him do what he will rightly, still Conscience whispers "it is your duty." ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... of the quality of courage, I never met a man who contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff as the individual who furnished me with Major Monsoon. But the major—I must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own—was a man of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my thinking unrivalled; the peculiar reflections on life ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... 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 ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... if it be pointed out to notice. By premonition of these particularities, I secured our pleasantry.' The feminine characters, Flirtillas, and Cleoras, and Euphelias, and Penthesileas, are, if possible, still more grotesque. Macaulay remarks that he wears the petticoat with as ill a grace as Falstaff himself. The reader, he thinks, will cry out with Sir Hugh, 'I like not when a 'oman has a great peard! I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Oddly enough Johnson gives the very same quotation; and goes on to warn his supposed correspondents ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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? ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... sense of humor, Lincoln appreciated to the utmost the inimitable presentation of "Falstaff" by a well-known actor of the time. His desire to accord praise wherever it was merited led him to express his admiration in a note to the actor. An interchange of slight civilities followed, ending at last in a singular situation. Entering the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... "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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... administration of Northumberland. Dr. Nares assures us over and over again that there could have been nothing base in Cecil's conduct on this occasion; for, says he, Cecil continued to stand well with Cranmer. This, we confess, hardly satisfies us. We are much of the mind of Falstaff's tailor. We must have better assurance for Sir John than Bardolph's. We ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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
... again, and briefly, is justice an inexorable law like the law of gravitation or can its operation have exceptions? Is it simply a quality of action or conduct, or, as stated by Ulpian, is it a disposition or state of mind? Finally, is it a reality or, as Falstaff said of honor, is it after all "a word," "a ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... produce a wine which, two or three centuries ago, was held in higher estimation than at present, and is supposed by some to have been the veritable "sack" that so continually moistened the throat of Falstaff. The very name of Canary is a cheerful one, associated as it is with the idea of bounteous vineyards, and of those little golden birds that make ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... Sterne. The famous Abbey of Thelema is inspired by More's "Utopia"; on the other hand, Shakespeare's praise of debt is taken from the speech of Panurge—the most humorous character in French literature, and worthy to stand beside Falstaff. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various |
