Death of the Sensualist.
--The end of Falstaff may stand as a type for the close of every such life. It was without regret and without honor. There is no life so melancholy in its close as that of a licentious wit. The companions with whom he jested abandon him; the hope of the visible world is gone, and in the spiritual he has no refuge. Pleasure was the bond by which he held his former associates, and by affliction that bond is broken. The gay assembly takes no thought of him, and the place therein shall know him no more. Instead of the hilarious looks which were wont to beam around him, a crowd of ghastly images are flitting in his solitary room; instead of the blaze of many lights, there is the dimness of a single taper; and for the song of the viol, there are the meanings of death.The class is well embodied in Falstaff, in his life, also in his death. No death in Shakespeare is more sadly impressive to me than that of Falstaff. In other deaths there is the sweetness of innocence, or the force of passion. Desdemona expires in her gentleness; Hamlet, with all his solemn majesty about him; Macbeth reels beneath the blow of destiny; Richard, in the tempest of his courage and his wickedness, finds a last hour conformable to his cruel soul; Lear has at once exhausted life and misery; Othello has no more for which he can exist; but the closing moments of Falstaff are gloomy, without being tragic; they are dreary and oppressive, with little to relieve the sinking of our thoughts, except it be in the presence of humanity in the person of Mrs. Quickly. When prince and courtier had forsaken their associate, this humble woman remained near him. The woman, whose property he squandered, and whose good name he did not spare, this woman, easily persuaded and easily deceived, would not quit even a worthless man in his helpless hour, nor speak severely of him when that hour was ended. Here is the greatness of Shakespeare; he never forgets our nature, and in the most unpromising circumstances he compels us to feel its sacredness. The last hours of Falstaff he enshrouds in the dignity of death, and by a few simple and pathetic words in the mouth of his ignorant but charitable hostess, he lays bare the mysterious struggles of an expiring soul. "A parted," she says, ‘"even just between twelve and one, e'en at the turning of the tide; for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with the flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields. How now, Sir John, quoth I; what, man, be of good cheer. So a cried out God, God, God! three or four time — then all was cold."’
Thus, as Shakespeare pictures, a man of pleasure died. Even upon him nature again exerts his away; the primitive delights of childhood revisit his final dreaming, and he plays with flowers, and he babbles of green fields. And that voice of Eternal Power, which was lost in the din of the festival, must have utterance in the travail of mortality; and the exclamations, which falter to the silence of the tomb, make confession of a faith which all the practice had dented.
