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And so speaking, falls like one dead at her lord's feet. Then I, running like one distraught to fetch Marian, do tilt pell-mell into Lord Robert, who hath come down to Amhurste for a week or so of rest. "Heydey!" quoth he. "What Jack-a-lent hath frighted thee?" And I told him all.
Then setting spurs to his horse, he passed through freely, his horse not fearing nor being anything affrighted at the sight of the dead bodies; for he had accustomed him, according to the doctrine of Aelian, not to fear armour, nor the carcasses of dead men; and that not by killing men as Diomedes did the Thracians, or as Ulysses did in throwing the corpses of his enemies at his horse's feet, as Homer saith, but by putting a Jack-a-lent amongst his hay, and making him go over it ordinarily when he gave him his oats.
If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of him we should by no means treasure him as we do now; but it is through the histories that we learn to know and appreciate him, and it is of the man portrayed there that we always unconsciously think when, in his humiliating discomfiture, we hear him declare that "wit may be made a Jack-a-lent when 'tis upon ill employment."
Here only does Shakespeare show that he feels the necessity of condescending to such evasion or such apology as is implied in the explanation of Falstaff's incredible credulity by a reference to "the guiltiness of his mind" and the admission, so gratifying to all minds more moral than his own, that "wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment."
"And how now, my masters?" said the Abbot of Unreason; "and wherefore look on me with such blank Jack-a-Lent visages? Will you lose your old pastime for an old wife's tale of saints and purgatory? Why, I thought you would have made all split long since Come, strike up, tabor and harp, strike up, fiddle and rebeck dance and be merry to-day, and let care come to-morrow.
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