Distaff

“ The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.
“You are the fellow we want,” said Defarge, in his ear; “you make these fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”
“Hey!” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that's true.”
“These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath tells them. ”

“ Not for the first time in my life—not for the first time in this enterprise—I acted as only one could act who was possessed by some spirit of mischief for his own undoing. Even to myself the impulse which comes over me at times to play the fool—to say or do at the critical moment the one word or thing which ought to be left unsaid or undone, is altogether unaccountable. ”

“ Indeed, I may tell you in confidence, that I always find disobedience answer very well. One is often scolded, it is true, but then one has been saved some trouble.
‘At the earliest dawn of day Mirlifiche woke me, and made me take many journeys to the stable to bring her word how her unicorn had slept, and how much hay he had eaten, and then to find out what time it was, and if it was a fine day. I was so slow, and did my errands so badly, that before she left she called the King and Queen and said to them:
‘“I am much more pleased with you this year. ”

“ The Hostess Quickly employs two officers to arrest Falstaff: On the mention of his name, one of them immediately observes, “that it may chance to cost some of them their lives, for that he will stab.”—“Alas a day,” says the hostess, “take heed of him, he cares not what mischief he doth; if his weapon be out, he will foin like any devil; He will spare neither man, woman, or child.” Accordingly, we find that when they lay hold on him he resists to the utmost of his power, and calls upon Bardolph, whose arms are at liberty, to draw. ”

“ She lay very still, her eyes closed, her face a scarlet flame. She was frightened at the swift realization of its overwhelming reality. The touch of his hand thrilled to the last fiber and nerve of her body. Her own trembling fingers clung to him with desperate longing tenderness. She roused herself with an effort and drew away.
“That's enough now. I must have a little common-sense. Let's go——”
He clung to her hand.
“You'll let me come to see you, tomorrow night?”
“Yes——”
“And the next night—and every night this week—what's the difference? There's nobody to say no, is there?” ”

“ You're not in a fit state to take a resolution. You are in despair, and what you intend to do ought to be well considered. Nothing is more easy than to go to Dustbury. 'Here I am! I'm Viola! I've killed that rascal, Catspaw!' Why it's mere child's-play to say the words. But the worst is behind. When they've once got you into gaol, I don't see how you can get out of it. ”

“ I did not get out of bed all day. At night I went down to supper. The clerk at the desk of the hotel called me and said, ‘Miss Worth, I have a terrible sin to confess to you. I’m a lover myself, and I’ve done you a wrong. I returned to a young man yesterday a letter to you by request of the General. Forgive me for it, and don’t tell him I told you.’
“That night Papa and I had a fearful scene. I will not attempt to describe it. But the end was, I said to him with all the courage of despair: I am twenty-one years old. I am a free woman. ”

“ Now, in the first place, cowards do not get fat. They are a nervous race—unquiet and dyspeptic. The stage Falstaff runs away from Gadshill like a boy from a turnip-ghost; not like a sensible man with a respect for his skin, having reason to believe the latter in some peril. ”

“ Now, my good sweet honey lord, ride with us tomorrow. I have a jest to execute that I cannot manage alone. Falstaff, Bardolph, Peto, and Gadshill shall rob those men that we have already waylaid. Yourself and I will not be there. ”

“ Sir John Falstaff.—You rogue, here’s lime in this sack too: There is nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man: Yet a coward is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it; a villainous coward.—Go thy ways, old Jack; die when thou wilt, if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in England ”

“ And, therefore, you may be safely sure that, like Falstaff, but with a modification almost as large as himself, I shall try rather to be the cause of speaking in others than to speak myself to-night. Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a snuff shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand, who, having apparently taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line. ”

“ These are ours only if the mirthmaker be a living man whose jests we hear as they come fresh from his own lips. All I claim for Falstaff is that he would be able to convulse us if he were alive and accessible. ”

“ Falstaff in the comedy is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled, victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women, who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his sensuality and insolence. ”

“ This is the Excellency of the Character of Sir John Falstaff; the Ground-work is Humour, the Representation and Detection of a bragging and vaunting Coward in real Life; 26 However, this alone would only have expos'd the Knight, as a meer Noll Bluff, to the Derision of the Company; And after they had once been gratify'd with his Chastisement, he would have sunk into Infamy, and become quite odious and intolerable: But here the inimitable Wit of Sir John comes in to his Support, and gives a new Rise and Lustre to his Character; For the sake of his Wit you forgive his Cowardice ”

“ Imagine the night I have spent, between a woman crazy with love and a man crazy with despair. And a statesman’s despair is not like that of an idiot. Serizy, as calm as if he were sitting in his place in council, clutched his chair to force himself to show us an unmoved countenance, while sweat stood over the brows bent by so much hard thought.—Worn out by want of sleep, I dozed from five till half-past seven, and I had to be here by half-past eight to warrant an execution. ”

“ He has continually in his mind’s eye the awful falling of the curtain on anguish and despair and death. Half unconsciously he hastens on in his perusal, and slurs over minor episodes and seemingly trifling facts, forgetting that these are subsidiary and auxiliary to the terrible consummation which he so anxiously awaits. ”

“ Why, if you stood here now, freed from this devilish disguise, the old, fat, sluggish fellow that sat and yawned his head off under my eyes in his pew the Sunday before last, if I know anything about human nature I’d say it to your face, and a fig for your vanity and resignation—your last state would be worse than the first. ”

“ The face that looked out into the dim night was as strange as the scene could be, though it lacked the utter stillness of the shrouded, moonlit earth. The eyes were wild and wandering, with an impatient, hungry look in them, as though they were searching, seeking, striving to draw from the visible the secrets of that which no eye beholds; the mouth quivered with the storms of feeling; the brow was contracted by a mortal agony, and from time to time the pale lips moved as if in pitiful appeal to some hidden power. But after a few moments of earnest gazing some of all this passed by. ”

“ A character really possessing the qualities which are on the stage imputed to Falstaff, would be best shewn by its own natural energy; the least compression would disorder it, and make us feel for it all the pain of sympathy: It is the artificial condition of Falstaff which is the source of our delight; we enjoy his distresses, we gird at him ourselves, and urge the sport without the least alloy of compassion ”

“ Its influence upon me, for example, tended, I am sure, to give me a pronounced distaste for the coarse and vulgar sort of dissipation which very often engaged the leisure of my office companions, and other youths of similar occupation in Sydney. It may be that the causes behind my aloofness from mere vulgar frivolity, and worse, were pretty mixed: part pride, or even conceit, and part prudence or parsimony. No matter. The influence was helpful, for the abstention was real, and the distaste grew always more rooted as time wore on. ”

“ Without any means to provide himself with food or clothing, with a mind borne down with trouble and suffering, and bereft of every hope from which the slightest consolation might be derived, the once honest man was driven to a career of desperation and crime which, if given in its details, would cause the blood-thirsty tales of the yellow-covered trash to pale for their very puerility and tameness. ”

“ One Man, a Master of a Family in my Neighbourhood, having had the Distemper, he thought he had it given him by a poor Workman whom he employ’d, and whom he went to his House to see, or went for some Work that he wanted to have finished, and he had some Apprehensions even while he was at the poor Workman’s Door, but did not discover it fully, but the next Day it discovered it self, and he was taken very ill ”

“ She discourses, she carves, she gives the leer of invitation. I can construe the action of her familiar style; and the hardest voice of her behaviour, to be Englished rightly, is “I am Sir John Falstaff’s.”
PISTOL.
He hath studied her will and translated her will—out of honesty into English.
NYM.
The anchor is deep. Will that humour pass?
FALSTAFF.
Now, the report goes she has all the rule of her husband’s purse. He hath a legion of angels.
PISTOL.
As many devils entertain, and “To her, boy,” say I.
NYM.
The humour rises; it is good. Humour me the angels. ”

“ And all infectious distempers must be communicated by those passages.
Some distempers or dispositions of body, make men rave; others make them melancholy: Some give them courage, impetuosity, prodigious energy of mind, and rapturous thoughts and expressions; others sink and depress their spirits, give them panick fears, dismal apprehensions, melancholy images, and secret frights; and they will all account for such sensations from their former imbibed prejudices by early education, and by long use become familiar to them. ”

“ One would think that the inventor of these scandals was a crutched and limping fellow, who being himself stunted and dwarfed below the waist was trying to sneer into disuse all walking the world over, or one 13who 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. ”

“ He lives on the resources of his wits, playing tricks worthy a whipping if not a hanging on respectable persons of limited [310] capacity. His most notable victim is the purveyor of drink or victualler to the camp, a tun-bellied coward, proud of his pretended noble descent, a Falstaff grown old, whose wit has been blunted, who has ended by marrying Mistress Quickly, and has himself become tavern keeper in partnership with her. ”

“ And we are the more disposed to judge leniently of Falstaff, inasmuch as his merry persecutors are but a sort of decorous, respectable, commonplace people, who borrow their chief importance from the victim of their mischievous sport; and if they are not so bad as to make us wish him success, neither are they so good that we like to see them thrive at his expense. ”

“ You saw, or fancied you saw in them the shrewdness, the delicacy of tact; the consciousness of duping others; the subtle and intuitive, yet bland and noiseless penetration into the characters around him, which made the prominent features of his mind. And, indeed, of all qualities, dissimulation is that which betrays itself the most often in the physiognomy. A fortunate thing, that the long habit of betraying should find at times the index in which to betray itself. ”

“ But this resource was by no means invented by Falstaff. This world is an old hand at it; and, whenever the truth of one age summons the error of the past to arrest and judgment, the interested parties start a dodge, and stimulate it with voluble pretence of earnestness, hoping to make it serve their day, at least. ”

“ The individual known as Deschars (a man nullified by his wife) does not hear the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that a man may spend his money with other women.
Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to the pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins. Adolphe is gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a whole sermon in Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. ”

“ This, according to the luminous and voluminous critic in the Courier, is because their affairs are not under the management of a single person. Would the same argument prove that the affairs of Europe had better have been under the direction of one man? ‘The gods have not made’ the writer in the Courier logical as well as ‘poetical.’ By the rule above hinted at, every actor is qualified to play Falstaff who is physically incapacitated to play any other character. ”