when they lay all night in the windmill in St. George's Field we do
not quite know; but we are safe in assuming that they did not go there
to pursue their legal duties, or to grind corn. Anyhow, forty years
after, that night raised pleasant memories.

John Falstaff was the life and centre of this set, as Robert Shallow
was the butt of it. The latter had few personal attractions. According
to Falstaff's portrait of him, he looked like a man made after supper
of a cheese-paring. When he was naked he was for all the world like a
forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife:
he was so forlorn that his dimensions to any thick sight were
invincible: he was the very genius of famine; and a certain section of
his friends called him mandrake: he came ever in the rearward of the
fashion, and sung those tunes to the over-scutched huswives that he
heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his
good-nights. Then he had the honour of having his head burst by John o'
Gaunt, for crowding among the Marshal's men in the Tilt-yard, and this
was matter for continual gibe from Falstaff and the other boys.
Falstaff was in the van of the fashion, was witty himself without
being at that time the cause that wit was in others. No one could come
within range of his wit without being attracted and overpowered. Late
in life Falstaff deplores nothing so much in the character of Prince
John of Lancaster as this, that a man cannot make him laugh. He felt
this defect in the Prince's character keenly, for laughter was
Falstaff's familiar spirit, which never failed to come at his call. It
was by laughter that young Falstaff fascinated his friends and ruled
over them. There are only left to us a few scraps of his conversation,
and these have been, and will be, to all time the delight of all good
men. The Clement's Inn boys who enjoyed the feast, of which we have
but the crumbs left to us, were happy almost beyond the lot of man.