Yet more literary comments. "Once more unto the breach." Falstaff's friends. Satire for laughs. Gilbert, Highet, Arnold Bennett, Max Beerbohm. Robert Benchley. Horace. Swift. Shakespeare!

The beckoning breach: "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more," begins Henry V's stirring pre-battle exhortation. "Or close the wall up with our English dead!"

Thirty lines later, he concludes,

"The game's afoot!

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,"

Cry, 'God for Harry, England and Saint George!'"

I thrilled to that, though I'd read it long before re-reading it of a Sunday at Einstein Brothers Bagels after Mass at St. Vincent's up the street.

Meantime, I'd associated "the game's afoot" with Sherlock Holmes, who says it to Dr. Watson when going after the criminal. Another lesson in how Shakespeare created our language.

Another language lesson comes when Exeter, Henry's ambassador, asks the French king to "overlook" what he gave him, meaning to look it over - just the opposite of what we mean by the word. Four hundred years make a difference.

For the groundlings: Another aspect of Shakespeare's genius is the pace of things. The scene right after the stirring exhortation mocks it. "On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!" says Bardolph, a friend of the late Falstaff, the king's fellow roisterer in his Prince of Wales days.

Bardolph and Nym and Pistol, two other roisterers, decide the hell with this fame and honor business, leaving the stage to the servant boy who thinks about it aloud, then decides to "leave them, and seek some better service."

Later Bardolph is caught stealing from a church. Pistol tries to get him off, but Bardolph is hanged for discipline's sake. The servant boy is one of those slaughtered by looting French soldiers while he guarded the baggage.

"We would have all such offenders so cut off," says Henry of Bardolph. "And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages . . . for when lenity [leniency] and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner." He intended to rule this land and saw no point in angering its people.

It's part of the whole awareness of Shakespeare. He was so far from going whole hog imperialist a la Kipling or whole hog skeptic a la James Joyce, that he seemed to keep 19 possibilities in his head at once, touching base here, there, wherever it seemed good, to give us in one fell swoop a panoramic view of the proceedings, and all of course in a few extremely well chosen words.

Making fun and having it: In his "Requiem for a Noun, or Intruder in the Dusk," Peter De Vries pictures "a cold brussels sprout" rolling off the page of the book and lying "defunctive" on his lap. It is held, furthermore, in a "fat, insolent fist" beneath a "bland, defiant face," above which hung "the shock of black hair like tangible gas."

He was doing Faulkner with "reverential amusement," says Gilbert Highet in his 1962 book, Anatomy of Satire. Parody isn't always reverential, needless to say. Highet tells of Arnold Bennett reading a Max Beerbohm takeoff on him and sinking from writing thousands of words a day to none, "until the shock of this operation wore off, and the scar of Max's cautery ceased to throb." Ouch.

So with writers in the U. of Iowa workshop in the '60s. For quite a while after your work had been criticized by the group, you couldn't write anything, a veteran told me.

It does take a strong heart, stomach, etc., to survive criticism. One needs a discerning view of readers and critics. Some are not good to listen to and must be ignored. In the after life, fine. Hear them out as angels sing in the background. But for now, find a muse and listen to her. She may lead astray but at least she leads.

Little noted item on Western reading habits: By the mid-18th century, more reading was being done in England partly because houses were warmer in winter and candles were better and gave more light. Thus has the race -- human, that is, and in northern climes -- developed good habits thanks in part to material progress. Take that, you Luddites.

Go to, you: Robert Benchley, the incomparable American humorist of the 1930s and later, having read in the Book of Proverbs, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise," spent an afternoon in that pursuit and learned that when carrying a large crumb on his head, he should walk sideways.

You make-a me laugh: For the Roman poet Horace, the goal was to tell "the laughing truth," which is bad translation of good Latin but instructive anyhow. He saw truth laughing at him and responded accordingly in his Satires.

Not very lawyerly: As if lawyers need any more potshots in their direction, Jonathan Swift in his Polite Conversation, the 3rd Dialogue has this: " . . . he's a concealer of the law." Your turn, counsel. (all three items from Highet's Anatomy of Satire)

Delaying tactic: Consider "anon." In Shakespeare, as in "Henry IV, Part One," it's used by a waiter telling Falstaff he'll be right there at once. "Anon," he keeps saying but never comes. So we use it as "by and by" or "in a little while." But it was short for "at once" and was used to put someone off, as in "right away" or "coming" when someone says, "Come on" and we don't come because we're busy. It’s a time-honored dodge.