no fighting; so he brandishes up to the very verge of blows, to make Bardolph say, "He that strikes the first stroke, I'll run him up to the hilts, as I am a soldier." Pistol manages to have this threat arrive on the ground just in time to apprehend the parties for a breach of the peace. Nym shoves his sword back with the feigned grumble of a disappointed man: "I will cut thy throat, one time or other, in fair terms; that is the humor of it,"—Mrs. Quickly having plighted her troth to him, and Pistol having married her in spite of it.
A man with a great flow of animal spirits is sometimes, especially if he is liable, to sudden bursts of this exuberance, mistaken to be under the influence of wine. FalstafFs average rate of mirth is so high that wine refuses to contest it. The blood of his vein can afford to be handicapped against the blood of the grape. The monstrous quantities of sack sink through the porosities of his rotundity, and mildly percolate a subterranean world; so that his abstinence in the article of bread is a very nice instinct that balancing bulk enough exists already.
Falstaff, by every ordinary law of human nature, should be inebriated. His exemption is a kind of atheism. But he prefers to have his own vices overdone in the persons of his companions, all of whom seem to have anticipated the sanitary argument in favor of the use of liquor that an American suggested: "If water will rot a cedar-post, what will it do to the human stomach!" Now Pistol's brain, owing to the rarefaction produced by rhetoric, is an exhausted receiver into which all fluids
