Corporal Nym will cut a purse and drain a can without winking, as the rest will; but he admires to have a pretence of soldierly bluntness, as when he says, "I dare not fight; but I will wink, and hold out mine iron." He is a man of few words, and has something of Cromwell's enigmatic way of speaking to cover his deliberate intention of doing nothing to end his days. "I cannot tell; things must be as they may. There must be conclusions. Well, I cannot tell, ... and that's the humor of it." A silent man, but not of the fighting type which helped Queen Elizabeth's adventurers to sack the towns of the Spanish main and defray the expense of her countenance. His rapier is out before his bluster, because the latter has rusted in its sheath. He has a quarrel with Pistol about eight shillings,--not the first, by many a tavern reckoning; and he has an unaffected desire to run him through the body and let out his vaporing.
"Pay!" cries Pistol: I have not sunk so low as that. "Base is the slave that pays." Out come the swords, and you expect "flashing fire will follow." But Pistol has calculated that Bardolph, who is present, will allow 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. Falstaff's 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.