who have always been opinionated of their own wit; they have turned
themselves mostly to poetry. This is the most numerous branch of
our family, and the poorest. The Quarterstaffs are most of them
prize-fighters or deer-stealers; there have been so many of them
hanged lately that there are very few of that branch of our family
left. The Whitestaffs are all courtiers, and have had very
considerable places. There have been some of them of that strength
and dexterity that five hundred of the ablest men in the kingdom
have often tugged in vain to pull a staff out of their hands. The
Falstaffs are strangely given to drinking: there are abundance of
them in and about London. And one thing is very remarkable of this
branch, and that is, there are just as many women as men in it.
There was a wicked stick of wood of this name in Harry the Fourth's
time, one Sir John Falstaff. As for Tipstaff, the youngest son, he
was an honest fellow; but his sons, and his sons' sons, have all of
them been the veriest rogues living; it is this unlucky branch has
stocked the nation with that swarm of lawyers, attorneys, serjeants,
and bailiffs, with which the nation is overrun. Tipstaff, being a
seventh son, used to cure the king's evil; but his rascally
descendants are so far from having that healing quality that, by a
touch upon the shoulder, they give a man such an ill habit of body
that he can never come abroad afterwards. This is all I know of the
line of Jacobstaff; his younger brother, Isaacstaff, as I told you
before, had five sons, and was married twice; his first wife was a
Staff, for they did not stand upon false heraldry in those days, by
whom he had one son, who, in process of time, being a schoolmaster
and well read in the Greek, called himself Distaff or Twicestaff.
He was not very rich, so he put his children out to trades, and the
Distaffs have ever since been employed in the woollen and linen
manufactures, except myself, who am a genealogist. Pikestaff, the