we feel the working of a heart so full that it cannot choose but overflow. Perhaps indeed he has never heard it said that 66 an honest man's the noblest work of God"; perhaps he has never even thought it consciously; but it is the core of his practical thinking; he lives it, and therefore knows it by heart, if not by head.

This explains what are deemed the looser parts of his conduct while Prince of Wales. For his character, through all its varieties of transpiration in the three plays where he figures, is perfectly coherent and all of a piece. In the air of the Court there was something, he hardly knew what, that cut against his grain; he could not take to it. His father was indeed acting a noble part, and was acting it nobly; at least the Prince thought so: still he could not but feel that his father was acting a part. Dissimulation, artifice, official fiction, attentiveness to show, and all that course of dealing where less is meant than meets the ear, were too much the style and habit of the place: policy was the method, astuteness the force, of the royal counsels; and plain truth was not deep enough for one who held it so much his interest to hoodwink the time. Even the virtue there cherished was in great part a made-up, surface virtue; at the best there was a spice of disingenuousness in it. In short, the whole administration of the State manifestly took its shape and tone from the craft of the King, not from the heart of the man.

To the Prince's keen eye all this was evident, to his healthy feelings it was offensive; he craved the fellowship of something more fresh and genuine; and was glad to get away from it, and play with simpler and honester natures, where he could at least be frank and true, and where his spirits might run out in natural freedom. Covering discretion with a coat of folly" was better in his sense of things than to have his native sensibilities smothered under such a varnish of solemn plausibility and factitious constraint. Even his inborn rectitude found a more congenial climate where no virtue at all was professed, and where its claims

were frankly sported off, than where there was so much of sinister craft and indirection mixed up with it: the reckless and spontaneous outpourings of moral looseness, nay, the haunts of open-faced profligacy, so they had some sparkling of wit and raciness of humour in them, were more to his taste than the courts of refined hypocrisy and dissimulation, where politicians played at hide-and-seek with truth, and tied up their schemes with shreds of Holy Writ.

Still it should be noted withal, that during his intercourse with Falstaff the Prince was all the while growing better, whereas Falstaff was daily growing worse. This was because the former was secretly intent on picking out the good, the latter the evil, of that intercourse. With the one it was a process of free and generous self-abandon; with the other, of greedy and sensual self-seeking. So the Prince went into the Gadshill robbery merely as a frolic; the jest of the thing was what he looked to; and he took care to have all the money paid back to the losers. On the other hand, Falstaff's sole thought was to snatch the means of self-indulgence; and so the act was all of a piece with his cheating the Hostess out of her hard-earned cash by practising on her simple-hearted kindness; and with his laying a plot to swindle Shallow, expressly on the ground that, "if the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him."

And it seems to me a very mark-worthy point in that great delineation, that while Falstaff was thus preparing for those darker villainies, the Prince was silently feeding the nobler mind which in due time prompted an utter repudiation of Sir John. At all events, whatever perils there might be in such companionship, I must needs think that even in the haunts of Eastcheap, as Shakespeare orders them, the Prince had a larger and richer school of practical wisdom; that he could there learn more of men, of moral good and evil, could get a clearer insight of the strengths and weaknesses of the human heart, and touch more springs of noble thought and purpose, than in any college of made

up appearances, where truth is so adulterated with cunning, that the mind insensibly loses its simplicity, and sucks in perversion under the names of dignity and prudence.

Accordingly, I suppose the Prince's course in this matter to have grown mainly from the one pregnant fact, that his tongue could not endure the taste of falsehood, nor his hand the touch of fraud. And because, from his fulness of inward worth, he must and would be true, and rejoiced in what was simple and candid and direct, and hated all disguise and pretence and make-believe, therefore his mind on all sides moved in contact with the truth and life of things. Thus the dangerous experiences he had with revellers and makesports were to him a discipline of virtue and wisdom: he found at least more of natural sap in them than in the walking costumes from which they withdrew him: the good that was in them he could retain, the ill he could discard, because the former had something in him to stick upon, which the latter had not: and he knew that the noblest fruit would grow larger and ripen better in the generous soil where weeds also grew, than in the dry enclosures where nature and soulpower were repressed, to make room for craft-power and artifice. Yet even then, as often as he had any manly work to do, an answering spirit of manliness was forthwith kindled within him, and the course of riot and mirth was instantly shaken off as at the touch of a stronger affinity. To apply one of Bacon's fine sayings, when once his mind had placed before it noble aims, it was immediately surrounded not only by the virtues, but by the gods.

The Prince knew himself to be under a cloud of ill thoughts and surmises; that he was held in slight esteem by his companions, his kindred, and his foes; that even Pointz put a bad construction on his behaviour; that his brothers gave him up, and his father viewed him with reproach and distrust; that in the glory of Hotspur's deeds himself was quite eclipsed; that every man was forethinking him a hopeless reprobate, and was shaking the head at the sound of his name: but all this did not appear to move him; still

VOL. H.

he seemed unconcerned, and intent only on playing out his game; untouched with compunctious visitings, and digesting his shames as quietly as if he were not aware of them.

This seeming insensibility was because he had at bottom the strength of a good conscience, and a firm trust in the might of truth: "rotten opinion" did not inwardly gall him, because he felt sure that in due time he should raze it out, and was content to abide his time. He had tried himself in noble work, and knew how sweet was the conscience of having done it like a man, and also knew that his inner mind on this score was a profound secret to those about him: the imputation of certain faults did not worry him, because he knew it was not really deserved; yet he was far from blaming others for it, because he also knew it seemed to be deserved; and in his modest disdain of show he could quietly face the misconstructions of the hour, and remain true to himself in the calm assurance that all would come right in the end. But especially his course of life and the ill repute it drew upon him exempted him from the pestilence of lordly flatterers and buzzing sycophants; and he might well deem the scenes of his mirth to be health and purity itself in comparison with an atmosphere sweetened with that penetrating defilement : if there was a devil in the former, it was at least an undisguised devil; which was vastly better than a devil sugared over so as to cheat the taste, and seduce the moral sentinels of the heart.

The character of Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth may almost be said to consist of piety, honesty, and modesty. And he embodies these qualities in their simplest and purest form; all sitting so easy and natural in him that he thinks. not of them. Then too, which is well worth the noting, they so draw and work together, that each may be affirmed of the others; that is, he is honest and modest in his piety, pious and modest in his honesty; so that there is nothing obtrusive or showy in his acting of these virtues: being solid and true, they are therefore much within and little without,

and are perfectly free from any air of pretence or design. And all the other manly virtues gather upon him in the train of these; while, as before remarked, at the centre of the whole stands a serene faith in the sufficiency of truth.

The practical working of this choice composure is well shown in what happened at the killing of Hotspur. No sooner had Prince Henry slain the valiant Percy than he fell at once to doing him the offices of pious and tender reverence; and the rather, forasmuch as no human eye witnessed the act. He knew that the killing of Hotspur would be enough of itself to wipe out all his shames, and " restore him into the good thoughts of the world again"; nevertheless he cheerfully resigned the credit of the deed to Falstaff. He knew that such a surreptitious honour would help his old companion in the way wherein he was most capable and needy of help; while, for himself, he could forego the fame of it in the secret pledge it gave him of other and greater achievements: the inward conscience thereof sufficed him; and the sense of having done a generous thing was dearer to him than the beguiling sensation of "riding in triumph on men's tongues." This noble superiority to the breath of present applause is what most clearly evinces the solidity and inwardness of his virtue.

Yet in one of his kingliest moments he tells us, “If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive." But honour is with him in the highest sense a social conscience, and the rightful basis of self-respect he deems it a good chiefly as it makes a man clean and strong within, and not as it dwells in the fickle breath of others. As for that conventional figment which small souls make so much ado about, he cares little for it, as knowing that it is often got without merit, and lost without deserving. Thus the honour he covets is really to deserve the good thoughts of men: the inward sense of such desert is enough: if what is fairly his due in that kind be withheld by them, the loss is theirs, not his.

Another characteristic article of his creed is that "in