The early lives of heroic personages, born at a date anterior to the
invention of parish registers, police sheets, and such vehicles of
subordinate renown, are usually enveloped in mystery. This remark (which
is not offered merely as a specimen of the writer’s originality) does
not, of course, apply to that highly favoured class of heroes who may be
said to be born to the business, and to note down whose earliest heroic
throes and struggles official chroniclers have been retained in all
ages; but exclusively to the work-a-day or journeyman hero, who has had
to establish himself in the heroic line from small beginnings--who
has had, as it were, to build his own pedestal in the Temple of
Fame, finding his own bricks, mortar, and wheelbarrows. This kind of
construction, in all ages, necessitating an immense deal of labour and
application, we generally find that by the time the pedestal is finished
and the hero ready to mount it, his condition of wind and limb is no
longer such as to enable him to do so with any remarkable degree of
alacrity; and that he has but little time and eyesight left to enjoy the
prospect afforded by his eminent position. In other words, by the time
a great man has acquired such dimensions as to make him an object of
public attention, it is generally at the moment when--like an over-blown
soap-bubble--he is about to collapse into nothing. And what man who
has travelled to distinction on foot cares--when he has changed his
boots--to talk or be reminded of the mud he has walked through?
These reflections are peculiarly applicable to the case of _Sir John
Falstaff_,--the individual hero whose career it will be the business of
these pages to trace. That great man, at the date of those sayings and
achievements which have gained him a world-wide celebrity, was--in spite
of his pardonable reluctance to admit the fact--already advanced in
years. His own accounts of his early life are meagre in the extreme,
and, justice compels us to add, by no means authentic. They are, in
fact, confined to a rather vague statement, that he was “born at
three o’clock in the afternoon, with a white head,” and other physical
peculiarities, which would lead to a suspicion that the knight was not
wholly free from a weakness common to great men of his epoch, namely,
an ambition for the doubtful honours of a prodigious birth. A further
assertion of early injuries, received through too assiduous application
to certain ecclesiastical duties, must be regarded as equally
apocryphal. Of the place of his birth, he makes no mention whatever; nor
do we find, in his admirable conversations immortalised by the historian
Shakspeare--to whose dramatic chronicles we shall frequently have to
confess our obligations in the course of this history--any allusion to
the character and circumstances of his parents.
But should the Biographer recoil before this merely negative obstacle of
barrenness, at the outset of his researches--as though a traveller, with
his mountain goal in sight, should sit down and despair because he sees
the plain beneath obscured by intervening mists? Has not the difficulty
of finding a needle in a bottle of hay (which, by the way, has always
appeared to us a remarkable article to be kept in bottle) been greatly
exaggerated? All you have to do, is to make sure that the needle is
really in the bottle. Patience and a microscope will lead you to its
discovery. It may be stated that between Sir John Falstaff and a
needle there is not much resemblance, and that an allusion to anything
microscopic in his case is inappropriate. We merely anticipate the
objection that we may pass it over. The fact that our knight lived to
the age of threescore odd is a proof (by induction) that he must have
been born somewhere, and at a date anticipatory by some sixty odd years
of that of his death. That he had the usual number of parents is at
least probable. That he had received a good education, for his time, we
have ample proof. These are great data to go upon. The needle is in the
bottle. All we have to do, is to separate carefully the musty hay of
antiquity, aided by the glass of investigation; to plunge boldly into
the mists of contradictory evidence, and push our way patiently till
we get to the mountain,--which, with the full length and breadth of Mr.
George Cruikshank’s faithful historical portrait on our opening page
before us, is perhaps a better image than the needle.
Reader! think not that we are going to trouble you to hunt with us. Deem
not that we should have presumed to appear before you till we had found
the needle, and cleared it from the last hayseed. Like Mohammed, of the
Arabian desert,--or Mr. Albert Smith, of the Egyptian Hall,--we have
been to the mountain; and, imitating the more modern popular leader,
appear before you, wand in hand, ready to describe the particulars of
our ascent, with illustrations. The amplest materials for the Life of
Sir John Falstaff are in our possession--from his birth, even to the
date of that morning when, at three of the clock, a small white head
(we reject the accompanying phenomena) made its first appearance in the
world; to his boyhood,--where the moving panorama will pause awhile,
at the court gate, to show you Thomas Mowbray’s page breaking Skogan’s
head, on that doubly memorable day that also witnessed an encounter
between Master William Shallow and Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer; on,
past his summer of manhood, to his glorious autumn, when our knight
reaped sheaves of golden renown at Gadshill and at Shrewsbury; to that
second Indian summer, when Sir John Falstaff, round and glorious as the
harvest moon, could still attract the gilding rays of sunny Mistress
Page’s view; down to that cold winter night, between twelve and
one--e’en at the turning of the tide!--when those fingers that of old
had grasped the hilt and managed the target, fumbled with the sheets and
played with flowers--when that voice that had been the mouthpiece of Wit
itself, the igniting spark of wit in others, could only babble of green
fields--till Sir John Falstaff’s feet grew cold as any stone, and so
upward and upward till all was as cold as any stone, even as that which
careless, laughing workmen fell to hewing and chipping on the following
day!
And where found we all this knowledge? It is no matter. In the pursuit
of our task, we shall reject the pitiful, inartistic plan of modern
historians, who are ever in such trepidation to stop you with their
authorities, (as though a man should wear his tailor’s receipt pinned to
the collar of his coat, to show that the garment has been honestly come
by!) but will rather imitate the independent manly fashion of the old
chroniclers, who told their stories in a simple, straightforward manner,
never caring to say whence they had them, but throwing them down in the
world’s face, like the gages of honest, chivalrous gentlemen, whose word
might not be questioned. This rule we intend observing scrupulously;
except, indeed, on occasions of necessity, when we may think proper to
deviate from it.
Our edifice once raised, we have removed the scaffolding. The public is
invited to enter.