"Falstaff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... effusions, and the tone of insufferable affectation with which they were uttered, roused my corruption to its utmost pitch, and I exclaimed aloud, "Think not, thou revivification of Falstaff—thou enlarged edition of Lambert—thou folio of humanity—thou Titan—thou Briareus—thou Sphynx—thou Goliath of Gath, that I shall bend beneath thy ponderous insolence?" The Mountain was amazed at my courage; I was amazed at it myself; but what will not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... Tennyson is perpetual melancholy—the mood and destiny of poetry, as I suppose—but Shakespeare is not melancholy, nor does he know how to be. His face is never sad, I think, and he is fonder of Jack Falstaff than we are apt to suppose; for health riots in his blood. He weeps, smiles breaking through his weeping, and he turns from the grave of tragedy with laughter leaning from his eyes. Aeschylus is a poet whose ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... see Foote at 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 ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... rascal. Some low creatures are mere bellies with no brain. Thersites is merely mouth, but this mouth has just enough coarse brain above it to know a wise man and a fool when he sees them. But the railings of this deformed slave are splendid. Thersites is almost as good as Falstaff. He is of course a far lower organization intellectually, and somewhat lower, perhaps, morally. He is coarser in every way; his humor, such as he has, is of the grossest kind; but still his blackguardism is the ideal of vituperation. He is far better than Apemantus in "Timon of Athens," for there ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... standard of proportion to one that is private and personal. The humorist refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he stamps it on whatever comes from him. "If reasons were as plenty as blackberries," says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of odd picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to the delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper than phrases: Falstaff takes his private standard into battle with him. There ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... at pleasure to tears or to laughter. He could haunt their memories for years afterwards with the infinite tenderness of his ejaculation as Hamlet, of "The fair Ophelia!" He could convulse them with merriment by his hesitating utterance as Falstaff of "A shirt—and a half!" Incidentally it is remarked by the biographer of Henderson that the qualifications requisite to constitute a reader of especial excellence seem to be these, "a good ear, a voice capable of inflexion, an understanding of, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... 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 to me richer than that of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... shrewd notion what Cuculain looked like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the horses' hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;—as I for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory's and Tennyson's well-groomed ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Ayrshire, Burns kept up a will o'-wispish sort of a correspondence in rhyme, till the day of his death: these communications, of which this is one, were sometimes graceless, but always witty. It is supposed, that those lines were suggested by Falstaff's account ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... I followed, quoting Mrs Quickly concerning Sir John Falstaff, '"bid him, 'a should not think of God: I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... significance, are abandoning the vague term "opera" and following Wagner in his adoption of the principles underlying the original terminology. Verdi called his "Aida" an Opera in quattro atti, but his "Otello" he designated a lyric drama (Dramma lirico), his "Falstaff" a lyric comedy (Commedia lirica), and his example is followed by the younger Italian composers, such as Mascagni, Leoncavallo, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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 of Amsterdam! ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... all our plantations, and Jamaica most notably, were full of the very Scum and Riffraff of our English towns. 'Twas as though you had let Fleet Ditch, dead dogs and all, loose on a West-India Island. That Ragged Regiment which Falstaff in the Play would not march through Coventry with were at free quarters in Jamaica, leave alone the regular garrison of King's Troops, of which the private men were mostly pickpockets, poachers, and runaway serving-men, who had enlisted to save ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... not help feeling sorry for the poor devil because, coward though he was, his was one of those personalities that carried with it a sort of likeableness, somewhat after the fashion of our time-honored Falstaff, and his funk under fire made him liable to the extreme penalty,—a firing squad. His teeth chattered like the keys of a typewriter as he asked me, "What do you think will come o' it, Grant? Do you think ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... was a fat old knight named Sir John Falstaff. Once Falstaff was boasting that he and three men had beaten and almost killed two men in buckram suits who had attacked and tried to rob them. The prince led him on and gave him a chance to brag as much as he wanted ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... 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 ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... and Krebel, editor of geographical and genealogical manuals,—all these were polite, cheerful, and friendly men. Zachariae was the most quiet; Pfeil, an elegant man, who had something almost diplomatic about him, yet without affectation, and with great good humor; Krebel, a genuine Falstaff, tall, corpulent, fair, with prominent, merry eyes, as bright as the sky, always happy and in good spirits. These persons all treated me in the most handsome manner, partly on Schlosser's account—partly, too, on account ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... afternoon service at three. The aggregate average attendance on a Sunday is about 3,000. There are three confessionals in the church, towards the south-eastern-corner; they stand out like small square boxes, and although made for everybody seem specially adapted for thin and Cassius-like people. Falstaff's theory was— more flesh more frailty. If this be so, then, there are either very few "great" sinners at St. Walburge's or the large ones confess somewhere else. The worshippers at this church are, in nine cases ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... 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 of ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... Windsor, had to boast some distinctions, which kept him aloof from the boys of his time. He was of that inordinate size that, like Falstaff, four square yards on even ground were so many miles to him; and the struggles which he underwent to raise himself when down might have been matter of instruction to a minority member. In the entrance to his Dame's gate ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of Jack Falstaff about Francis Schlatter, whose whitened bones were found amid the alkali dust of the desert, a few years ago—dead in an endeavor to do without meat and drink for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 de Corneille etoit a celui de Shakespeare ce qu' un seigneur est ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... foot, to witness one of these parades; for I believe that all the annals of the burlesque do not furnish a more amusing caricature of the "pomp and circumstance" of war. Compared to one of those militia regiments, Falstaff's famous corps, whose appearance was so unmilitary as to prevent even that liberal-minded gentleman from marching through Coventry in their company, was a model of elegance and discipline. Sedeno's cavalry in the South American ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass's head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as well as a character study. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... fancy, and 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
... untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... '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 them from all parts of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... Bilboa in Spain was once famous for well-tempered blades: these are quoted by Falstaff, where he describes the manner in which he lay in the buck-basket. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... 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 President's ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... devotee of another sort. Let us wait a while. For, as I live, it is a great puncheon of a woman, weighing over three hundred pounds—puffing and steaming as she waddles toward the shrine—a perfect Falstaff in petticoats. Shade of Venus! what a face and figure! Carbuncled with wine, and bloated with quass and cabbage soup, I'll bet my head, Dominico, she's a countess! How the juices of high living roll from her brow as she stoops down, and gives the unfortunate St. Nicholas a greasy dish-cloth of ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... trespasses the most venial, where the final intentions are honorable. But in this case there seems to have been something more in motion than passion or the ardor of youth. "I like not," says Parson Evans, (alluding to Falstaff in masquerade,) "I like not when a woman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler." Neither do we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy who had still two years and a half to run of his ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... monstrous assertions I only know one parallel, viz:—Falstaff's version of his victory over the robbers at Gadshill. The Protector asserts that "the shadow of the Spanish flag should never again darken Lima." It nevertheless passed completely round the city within half-musket shot. "The enemy thought that to view our camp was to ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... Seward and Parker, an aboriginal from the prairies, an ancient minstrel with a modern fiddle, and a modern minstrel with an ancient hurdy- gurdy. All these and more. Each man was a study in himself, and to all, Falstaff's description ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Why, 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 ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Christmas cheer would be incomplete without mention being made of Snap-dragon. It is an old sport, and is alluded to by Shakespeare in Henry IV., part ii. Act ii. sc. 4, where Falstaff says— ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... have put Falstaff to shame greeted Rutherford wheezily. "Fall off and 'light, Ford. She's in full ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... a happy—looking, red—faced, well—dressed man, soon drew his attention towards me. The party to whom I was thus indebted seemed a very jovial—looking personage, and appeared to be well known to all hands, and indeed the life of the party, for, like Falstaff, he was not only witty in himself, but the cause ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Nascita is the girl's pretext for making as close a representation as she can of the life to which she and her friends are accustomed. It is for her what the Shield of Achilles was for Homer, what the Falstaff scenes in King Henry IV were for Shakespeare, or what the Escape from Paris was ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... for the Habsburg's Southern Slavs. At Vukovar in Syrmia—to take an example—there was formed, as elsewhere, a National Council. Under Baron Joseph Rajacsich, a grandson of the Patriarch and—to all appearances—a brother of Falstaff, the Council maintained order until the coming of the Serbian army. An Austrian naval captain with a floating arsenal, four steamers and twenty-two drifters, was held up, as he proposed to sail towards Buda-Pest, by being told of a battery at Dalja, higher up the Danube. However, the Vukovar ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 small drum-shaped black cap on ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... passage, and marvelled how Lever knew certain things that he tells. He learned this, and much more, the humours of war, from the original of Major Monsoon. Falstaff is alone in the literature of the world, but if ever there came a later Falstaff, Monsoon was the man. And where have you such an Irish Sancho Panza as Micky Free, that independent minstrel, or such an Irish Di Vernon as Baby Blake? The critics may praise Lever's thoughtful ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... actors, Mr. Mackinnon's Prince Hal was a most gay and graceful performance, lit here and there with charming touches of princely dignity and of noble feeling. Mr. Coleridge's Falstaff was full of delightful humour, though perhaps at times he did not take us sufficiently into his confidence. An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience. However, he gave much pleasure to every one, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in many dreadful days there was great laughter. I think sometimes of a night I spent with the medical officers of a tent hospital in the fields of the Somme during those battles. With me as a guest went a modern Falstaff, a "ton of flesh," who "sweats to death and lards the lean earth ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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. ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... unbelief 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 we have now come to its completion as a building, except for ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... stately old place enough. It had been built in the days of Queen Bess; and was just such a house as that in which Justice Shallow might have entertained Falstaff—a long grey building with a porch in the centre and a huge gable at either end—a house with deep-mullioned windows and large stacks ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... 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 ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the close of the second day in Canterbury, the two "toke" their inn at the sign of the "Falstaff," where hung "Honest Jack, in buff doublet and red hose," in a wonderful piece of wrought-iron work. Whether next day, after viewing the cathedral, the tricycles pursued their journey, is not told. The pilgrimage ends, as it should, at the shrine,—that is, where the shrine had been; for the verger, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... intellectual or ideal. He is of the earth, earthy. Sly, selfish, sensual, his dreams are not of glory, but of good feeding. His only concern is for his carcass. His notions of honor appear to be much the same with those of his jovial contemporary Falstaff, as conveyed in his memorable soliloquy. In the sublime night-piece which ends with the fulling-mills—truly sublime until we reach the denouement—Sancho asks his master: "Why need you go about this adventure? It is main dark, and there is never a living soul sees us; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • 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 to the catalogue of his daring conflicts with the Whiteboys, and, ere the lapse ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... 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
... the drains furnish for them a cool and shady retreat from the mid-day sun, and they may be seen in single file by scores, at the approach of an intruding footstep, scrambling up the pipe. Dying in this way, affects these creatures, as "sighing and grief" did Falstaff, "blows them up like a bladder;" and, like Sampson, they do more mischief in their death, than in all their life together. They swell up, and stop the water entirely, or partially dam it, so that the effect of ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... 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 a thousand incidents of his generosity ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Valhalla of his soul To love, nor ever finds 'Love's Labor Lost.' No two-faced Falstaff proffers double suit; No Desdemona mourns Iago's art; And every Romeo ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... found in the present populous vicinage. The place of refreshment for the ruralizing cockney of 1737 was a substantial-looking tenement of the good old stamp, with great bay windows, and a balcony in front, bearing as its ensign the jovial visage of the lusty knight, Jack Falstaff. Shaded by a spreading elm, a circular bench embraced the aged trunk of the tree, sufficiently tempting, no doubt, to incline the wanderer on those dusty ways to "rest and be thankful," and to cry encore to a frothing tankard of the best ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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
... as often laid under the table as their subjects. My motive for preserving the story is the incident respecting carrying men in baskets: it was evidently a custom, which perhaps may have suggested the memorable adventure of Falstaff. It was a convenient mode of conveyance for those who were incapable of taking care of themselves before the invention of hackney coaches, which was of later date, in Charles ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... a gracious prosperity, and no pickling in the sharp acids of adversity, can destroy it. It is a part of the Virginia character—just as the flavor is a distinctive part of the oyster—"which cannot, save by annihilating, die." It is no use talking about it—the thing may be right, or wrong;—like Falstaff's victims at Gadshill, it is past praying for: it is a sort of cocoa grass that has got into the soil, and has so matted over it, and so fibred through it, as to have become a part of it; at least there is no telling which is the grass ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... to 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
... respectfully addressed by one of his admirers, James Quin, the Falstaff of the day, and the rival at this time of Garrick in tragic characters, though the general opinion was, that he could not long maintain a standing against the younger genius and ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... had been an awful row about something, and the prince had been escorted to the door by the butler, which, in said avenue, is equivalent to the impact of the avuncular shoe. A weak Prince Hal, without inheritance or sword, he drifted downward to meet his humorless Falstaff, and to pick the crusts of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... his belief in himself. But he despised Sheffer and feared Severance, not for what the latter represented, but for the cynical honesty of his attitude. In retort for Severance's stab, he dubbed the pair Mephistopheles and Falstaff, which was above his usual felicitousness of characterization. Sheffer (who read Shakespeare to improve his mind, and for ideas!) was ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... sections, would have been ludicrous had they not been fraught with such long-continued woes. Southern papers published such stuff as this: "The Northern soldiers are men who prefer enlisting to starvation; scurvy fellows from the back slums of cities, with whom Falstaff would not have marched through Coventry. Let them come South, and we will put our negroes at the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come South. Not a wretch of them will live on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... other reference in Shakespeare to this locality indicates that in his time there was a Windmill Inn in St. George's Fields, for he makes Shallow say to Falstaff— ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... had ever seen man and horse upon before. But even while the thought was passing through my head, Memnon was lying at my feet, flat as his equine rotundity would permit. Ashamed of my doubt, I lost not a moment in placing myself in the position suggested by Sir John Falstaff to Prince Hal for the defence of his own bulky carcase—astride the body of the animal, namely. At once he rose and lifted me into the natural relation of man and horse. Then he looked round at his master, and they set off ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Exaggerate their follies as much as you please; but woe be to you, if you wrongfully accuse them! You may sneer at, you may censure, you may castigate them for what they really do, but beware of reprehending them for that which they have never done. Even Sir John Falstaff revolted at the imputation of having kissed the keeper's daughter. A sermon against crinoline, be it ever so fulminating, finds ever an attentive and smiling congregation; but venture to preach against coal-scuttle bonnets—until the ladies have really taken to wearing them—and your hearers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... London had been his especial interest. That he would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous, dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern. Georgian London? What better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... to the potato in Shakespeare, and these are said to be the earliest notices of it in English literature. Thus in Troilus and Cressida: 'The devil luxury, with his fat rump, and potato finger, tickles these together!' In the Merry Wives, Falstaff says: 'Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the time of Green Sleeves; hail ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... 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 specimen ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... 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 ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... eclipses or new moons. Some were sturdy knaves, fat and saucy; and, whenever they ascertained that the "men folks" were absent, would order provisions and cider like men who expected to pay for them, seating themselves at the hearth or table with the air of Falstaff,— "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" Others, poor, pale, patient, like Sterne's monk, came creeping up to the door, hat in hand, standing there in their gray wretchedness with a look of heartbreak and forlornness which was never without its effect on ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the genus Trigla, so called from its peculiar grunt when removed from the water. Falstaff uses the term "soused gurnet" in a most contemptuous view, owing to its poorness; and its head being all skin and bone gave rise to the saying that the flesh on a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks, gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades. The jack was anything ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... an unforgettable man. To describe him in a word, he was Falstag REDIVIVUS. In bulk and stature, in age, in wit and humour, and morality, he was Falstaff. He knew it and gloried in it. He would complain with zest of 'larding the lean earth' as he walked along. He was as partial to whisky as his prototype to sack. He would exhaust a Johnsonian vocabulary in describing his ailments; and would appeal ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Committee, consisting of Mynheer in a burgomaster suit borrowed from a friend, and the four painters—Marny as a Dutch Falstaff, Pudfut as a Spanish Cavalier, Stebbins got up as a Night Watch, and Malone in the costume of a Man-at-Arms—all costumes loaned for the occasion by the antiquary in the next street—were to await Joplin's coming ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... (since goodness has no rule save freedom), "Do what you will." Of such a fraternity, love and marriage are the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare's Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit; he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such a disreputable associate if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked lewd rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," and we cannot part ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... clown in one of the new uniforms! Sir Fret. Ha! ha! Sneer. That your occasional tropes and flowers suit the general coarseness of your style, as tambour sprigs would a ground of linsey-woolsey; while your imitations of Shakspeare resemble the mimicry of Falstaff's page, and are about as near the standard as the original. Sir Fret. Ha! Sneer. In short, that even the finest passages you steal are of no service to you; for the poverty of your own language prevents their assimilating; ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... of the spare and lean kind, but were he fatter he might well pose as a modern Jack Falstaff, for his one idea is summed up in Falstaff's words: "Where shall we take a purse to-night?" Downy, of course, obtained full remission of his sentence; he did all that was required of him in prison, and so reduced ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... recited lines from the "Recessional." Of the great novelists Dickens was easily his first favourite; a long way behind came Scott, Stevenson and Jules Verne. Dickens he knew and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... parts as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true flavor of Falstaff in him—"a million a minute and your expenses paid." As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the circus, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... King Lear cursing his daughters, or deprecating the storm, that I remember his commendations of; but Iago's ingenious malice and subtle revenge; or Prince Hal's gay compliance with the vices of Falstaff, whom he all along despised. Those plays had indeed no rivals in Johnson's favour: "No man but Shakespeare," he said, "could ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... approach and rejoiced at their departure, for their march through their own country was a continued triumph, if one may judge from the amount of plunder they took from their friends upon the road. It was an expedition that Falstaff would have rejoiced to command, and his regiment would have distinguished themselves in such a war. Dry and dusty were the desert plains over which they marched, and dry and dusty were the throats of the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... D'Ewes for his admiration of two anagrams, expressive of the feelings of the times. It required the valour of Falstaff to attack extinct anagrams; and our pretended English Bayle thought himself secure in pronouncing all anagrammatists to be wanting in judgment and taste: yet, if this mechanical critic did not know something ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... of course, some officers in the service who went far beyond the limits of such venial irregularities and, like Falstaff, "misused the king's press damnably." Though according to the terms of their warrant they were "to take care not to demand or receive any money, gratuity, reward, or any other consideration whatsoever for the sparing, exchanging or discharging any person or persons impressed or to be impressed," ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... 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
... Kosloffsky everywhere; he was the fattest man I ever saw, a perfect Falstaff. However, his intellect was not smothered, for he would sit an hour with me talking about mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and what not. He was banished from Russia, and as he had been speaking imprudently ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... a pore lame sowldior hurted in the quenes servyce in yrland having a lisens." The town could make merry at times, as we find when sixpence was paid "for a pynte of Secke when our burgesse Mr. Harrys was chosen"—which is very moderate compared with Falstaff's payments for the same liquor. In 1626 we read that special harbour-dues were levied to pay for the repair of the "peere or Kay of St. Ives"; in which dues there were special charges for English vessels and somewhat ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... hussar and highland dresses; Tell them that youth once gone returns no more, That hired huzzas redeem no land's distresses; Tell them Sir William Curtis is a bore, Too dull even for the dullest of excesses, The witless Falstaff of a hoary Hal, A fool whose bells have ceased to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... reason ... was that I desired to have the country furnished with a practical illustration of high-church patriotism and loyalty in the hour of need. The Church and the Patriot had boasted of their multitudes; but those multitudes shrivelled into a Falstaff's company in an hour which detected the difference between the loyalty of the lip and the heart.... The elongated countenances in certain quarters for a few days [in December, 1837], will never be forgotten! From the Government House to ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... faithful to the Crown, and made good head against the rising rebellion. But, although we Loyalists were gagged and muzzled, though the Capitol was in the hands of the Whigs, and our vaunted levies of loyal recruits so many Falstaff's regiments for the most part, the faithful still kept intelligences with one another in the colony, and with our neighbours; and though we did not rise, and though we ran away, and though, in examination before committees, justices, and so forth, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... considerable likelihood of this manufacture being extensively introduced, on account of the dearness of rags, &c., it is to be hoped that it will not be improved into the resemblance of ordinary paper. Time was when ordinary paper could be written on in comfort, but that which adulterated Falstaff's sack spoiled it for the purpose, and converted it into limed twigs to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... eating his supper now, at what hour can he possibly have dined! A second solid mass of rump-steak has disappeared, and he eat the first in four minutes and three quarters, by the clock over the window. Was there ever such a personification of Falstaff! Mark the air with which he gloats over that Stilton, as he removes the napkin which has been placed beneath his chin to catch the superfluous gravy of the steak, and with what gusto he imbibes the porter which has been fetched, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... since I wrote the above, dear E——; but as mine is a story without beginning, middle, or end, it matters extremely little where I leave it off or where I take it up; and if you have not, between my wood rides and sick slaves, come to Falstaff's conclusion that I have 'damnable iteration,' you are patient of sameness. But the days are like each other; and the rides and the people, and, alas! their conditions, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble |
