freshness and spirit with which his characteristic traits are delivered.

/ These three good-for-nothing profligates are a fitting example of the human refuse and scum which lately gravitated round Sir John; and they serve the double purpose of carrying into the new scenes the memory of the King's former associations, and also of evincing the King's present severity and rectitude of discipline. They thus help to bridge over the chasm, which might else appear something too abrupt, between what the hero was as Prince of Wales and what he is as King: therewithal their presence shows him acting out the purpose, which he avowed at our first meeting with him, of imitating the Sun, who causes himself to be more wondered at

66

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him."

That some such clouds of vileness exhaled from the old haunts of his discarded life should still hang about his path, was natural in the course of things, and may be set down as a judicious point in the drama.

I have elsewhere* observed somewhat upon the remarkable character of the Boy who figures as servant to “these three swashers." He is probably the same whom we met with as Page to Falstaff in the preceding play. His arch and almost unconscious shrewdness of remark was even then a taking feature; and it encouraged the thought of his having enough healthy keenness of perception to ward off the taints and corruptions that beset him. And he now translates the follies and vices of his employers into apt themes of sagacious and witty reflection, touching at every point the very pith of their distinctive features. The mixture of penetration and simplicity with which he moralizes their pretentious nothings is very charming. Thus Pistol's turbulent vapourings draw from him the sage remark, "I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: but the saying is true, The empty vessel makes the greatest *Volume i. page 171.

sound. Bardolph and Nym had ten times more valour than this roaring Devil i' the old play, and they are both hang'd; and so would this be, if he durst steal any thing adventurously." Shakespeare specially delights in thus endowing his children and youngsters with a kind of unsophisticated shrewdness, the free outcome of a native soundness that enables them to walk unhurt amid the contagions of bad example; their own minds being kept pure, and even furthered in the course of manhood, by an instinctive oppugnance to the shams and meannesses which beset their path.

But the comic life of the drama is mainly centred in a very different group of persons. Fluellen, Jamy, and Macmorris strike out an entirely fresh and original vein of entertainment; and these, together with Bates and Williams, aptly represent the practical, working soldiership of the King's army. The conceited and loquacious Welshman, the tenacious and argumentative Scotchman, the hot and impulsive Irishman, with all whose nations the English have lately been at war, serve the further purpose of displaying how smoothly the recent national enmities have been reconciled, and all the parties drawn into harmonious co-operation, by the King's inspiring nobleness of character, and the catching enthusiasm of his enterprise. All three are as brave as lions, thoroughly devoted to the cause, and mutually emulous of doing good service; each entering into the work with as much heartiness as if his own nation were at the head of the undertaking. All of them too are completely possessed with the spirit of the occasion, where "honour's thought reigns solely in the breast of every man"; and as there is no swerving from the line of earnest warlike purpose in quest of any sport or pastime, so the amusement we have of them results purely from the spontaneous working-out of their innate peculiarities; and while making us laugh they at the same time win our respect, their very oddities serving to set off their substantial manliness.

Fluellen is pedantic, pragmatical, and somewhat querulous, but withal a thoroughly honest and valiant soul. He loves to hear himself discourse touching "the true discipline of the wars," and about "Alexander the Pig," and how "Fortune is painted plind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is plind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation" but then he is also prompt to own that "Captain Jamy is a marvellous falorous gentleman, and of great expedition and knowledge in th' aunchient wars"; and that "he will maintain his argument as well as any military man in the 'orld, in the disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans." He is indeed rather easily gulled into thinking Pistol a hero, on hearing him "utter as prave 'ords at the pridge as you shall see in a Summer's day": this lapse, however, is amply squared when he cudgels the swagger out of the "counterfeit rascal," and persuades him to eat the leek, and then makes him accept a groat to "heal his proken pate"; which is one of Shakespeare's raciest and most spirited comic scenes. Herewith should be noted also his cool discretion in putting up with the mouthing braggart's insolence, because the time and place did not properly allow his resenting it on the spot: and when he calls on him to "eat his victuals," and gives him the cudgel for sauce to it; and tells him, "You called me yesterday mountain-squire, but I will make you to-day a squire of low degree"; there is no mistaking the timber he is made of.

On another occasion, Fluellen sharply reproves one of his superior officers for loud-talking in the camp at night: "If you would take the pains but to examine the wars of Pompey the Great, you shall find, I warrant you, that there is no tiddle-taddle nor pibble-pabble in Pompey's camp": and the King, overhearing this reproof, hits the white of his character when he says to himself,

"Though it appear a little out of fashion,

There is much care and valour in the Welshman."

But perhaps the man's most characteristic passage is in his plain and downright style of speech to the King himself: the latter referring to the place of his own birth, which was in Wales, addresses him as "my good countryman," and he replies, "I am your Majesty's countryman, I care not who know it; I will confess it to all the 'orld: I need not be ashamed of your Majesty, praised be Got, so long as your Majesty is an honest man." On the whole, Fluellen is a capital instance of the Poet's consideration for the rights of manhood irrespective of rank or title or any adventitious regards. Though a very subordinate person in the drama, there is more wealth of genius shown in the delineation of him than of any other except the King.

The delineation of the King, as I have remarked in another place,* has something of peculiar interest from its personal relation to the author. It embodies the Poet's ethics of character. Here, for once, he relaxes his strictness of dramatic self-reserve, and lets us directly into his own conception of what is good and noble: in his other portraits we have the art and genius of the poet; here, along with this, is also reflected the conscience and heart of the

man.

The King is the most complex and many-sided of all Shakespeare's heroes, with the one exception of Hamlet; if indeed even Hamlet ought to be excepted. He is great alike in thought, in purpose, and in performance; all the parts of his character drawing together perfectly, as if there were no foothold for distraction among them. Truth, sweetness, and terror build in him equally. And he loves the plain presence of natural and homely characters, where all is genuine, forthright, and sincere. Even in his sternest actions as king, he shows, he cannot help showing, the motions of a brotherly heart: there is a certain grace and suavity in his very commands, causing them to be felt as benedictions. To be frank, open, and affable with all sorts * Volume i. page 247.

of persons, so as to call their very hearts into their mouths, and move them to be free, plain-spoken, and simple in his company, as losing the sense of inferior rank in an equality of manhood, — all this is both an impulse of nature and a rule of judgment with him. Nothing contents him short of getting heart to heart with those about or beneath him: all conventional starch, all official forms, all the facings of pride, that stand in the way of this, he breaks through; yet he does this with so much natural dignity and ease, that those who see it are scarcely sensible of it: they feel a peculiar graciousness in him, but know not why. And in his practical sense of things, as well as in his theory, inward merit is the only basis of kingly right and rule: yet he is so much at home in this thought, that he never emphasizes it at all; because he understands full well that such merit, where it really lives, will best make its way when left to itself, and that any boasting or putting on airs about it can only betray a lack of it.

Thus the character of this crowned gentleman stands together in that native harmony and beauty which is most adorned in being unadorned. And his whole behaviour appears to be governed by an instinctive sense of this. There is no simulation, no disguise, no study for appearances, about him: all got-up dignities, any thing put on for effect, whatever savours in the least of sham or shoddy, is his aversion; and the higher the place where it is used, the more he feels it to be out of place; his supreme delight being to seem just what he is, and to be just what he seems. In other words, he has a steadfast, living, operative faith in the plenipotence of truth: he wants nothing better; he scorns to rely on any thing less: this is the soul of all his thoughts and designs. The sense of any discrepancy between his inward and his outward parts would be a torment to him. Hence his unaffected heartiness in word and deed. Whatsoever he cannot enter into with perfect wholeness and integrity of mind, that he shrinks from having any thing to do with. Accordingly in all that flows from him