contrasts, were born within a few years of the middle of the
fourteenth century.

Falstaff's childhood was no doubt spent in Norfolk; and we learn from
his own lips that he plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top,
and that he did not escape beating. That he had brothers and sisters
we know; for he tells us that he is _John_ with them and _Sir
John_ with all Europe. We do not know the dame or pedant who taught
his young idea how to shoot and formed his manners; but Falstaff says
that _if_ his manners became him not, he was a fool that taught
them him. This does not throw much light on his early education: for
it is not clear that the remark applies to that period, and in any
case it is purely hypothetical.

But Falstaff, like so many boys since his time, left his home in the
country and came to London. His brothers and sisters he left behind
him, and we hear no more of them. Probably none of them ever attained
eminence, as there is no record of Falstaff's having attempted to
borrow money of them. We know Falstaff so well as a tun of man, a
horse-back-breaker, and so forth, that it is not easy to form an idea
of what he was in his youth. But if we trace back the sack-stained
current of his life to the day when, full of wonder and hope, he first
rode into London, we shall find him as different from Shakespeare's
picture of him as the Thames at Iffley is from the Thames at London
Bridge. His figure was shapely; he had no difficulty _then_ in
seeing his own knee, and if he was not able, as he afterwards
asserted, to creep through an alderman's ring, nevertheless he had all
the grace and activity of youth. He was just such a lad (to take a
description almost contemporary) as the Squier who rode with the
Canterbury Pilgrims: