such tyrannical youths, the eldest not being twenty years old." Forty years afterwards, if we mistake not, the memory of that night raised painful thoughts in the mind of Master Robert Shallow. "Shallow. O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the windmill in Saint George's fields? "Falslaff. No more of that, good master Shal low, no more of that." St. George's fields lay well outside the city, and it is probable that they took to the windmill on their way home from this enter tainment, perhaps for safe hiding, perhaps because the Inn gates had been shut long before. Other commentators are without exception agreed that the memories of Shal low on this occasion were all pleasant and all disreputable. But how much clearer is Falstaff's plaintive protest, if we believe that he was imprisoned the day after. Only the names of the two prodigies mentioned above are given. They were Kniveton and Light. But we shall add one or two more. "There was little John Doit, and black George Bare, and Francis Pick-bone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man; you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns of Court again." There is yet another name more famous still — but we will let Fleetwood tell his own story : " About a sevennight past, young Mr. Robert Cecill, your Lordship's son, passed by St. Clement's Churche, I standing there to see the lanterns hangen, and to see if I cold mete with any outrageous dealers. There stood sixe of the honest in habitants with me. ' Lo! ' quod they, ' Ye may see how a nobleman's son can use him self, and howe he putteth off his cap to poore men. Our Lord blesse him,' quod they. . . Your Lordship hath cause to thanke God for so virtuous a child." There were the makings of a diplomatist lost in Falstaff; and they were found in Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. You may see the double of the incident in the Knight' s interview with Gascoigne, when he warned the Judge of the
evils of bad company, and was tenderly solicitous as to how he bore his age. There is still a Lord Robert Cecil at the Inner Temple, who has earned the same amiable reputation among the burghers. But it is chiefly through the merits of an able treatise on Commercial Law. It is a pity that Falstaff nowhere makes any allusion to the inner polity of the Tem ple. Clement's Inn, to which he was at tached, was one of the junior schools of the Inner Temple, or, as Fortescue puts it, "such as receive gudgeons and smelts, while the Inns of Court have the polypuses and levia thans, the behemoths of the law." The fact that Falstaff never qualified for the haunts of the behemoth seems to point to an abrupt and early ending to his relations with his University. The only legal phrase that we can find attributed to him is, " the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms or two actions, and with all intervallums." — A hard saying and designed, apparently, to bring ridicule on the profession. Neverthe less, it is evident that most of the memories of his student days were pleasant to him and would bear re-telling. A good man makes his life-time doubly last And lives twice o'er as he recalls the past. There was nothing of " my Lord Coke's shop " about his recollection, and we do not doubt that some whisper of the old mad days lingered, too, on his lips when he "babbled o' green fields " at the last. How much of Falstaff is true and how much is false does not, as Mr. Burrell, Q.C., says of "The Bible in Spain," "matter a dump." He may have been a portrait or a type. In any case he is the greatest Temple student in literature. Of Sir Edward Coke it was said that to no man were the liberties of England so much indebted as to him, and by some he is called our greatest Eng lish lawyer. Of Falstaff it has to be said that he took more liberties than he gave,
