treading. But, besides this, the same forecast is also placed silently in the general drift and action of the piece; which infers the whole workmanship to have been framed with that far-stretching train and progeny of evils consciously in view.

But the most noteworthy point in this matter is the Poet's calmness and equipoise of judgment. In the strife of factions and the conflict of principles, he utters, or rather lets the several persons utter, in the extremest forms, their mutually-oppugnant views, yet without either committing himself to any of them or betraying any disapproval of them. He understands not only when and how far the persons are wrong in what they say or do, but also why they cannot understand it: so he holds the balance even between justice to the men and justice to the truth; for he knows very well how apt men are to be at fault in their opinions while upright in their aims. The claims of legitimacy and of revolution, of divine right, personal merit, and public choice, the doctrines of the monarchical, the t aristocratic, the popular origin of the State, all these are by turns urged in their most rational or most plausible aspects, but merely in the order and on the footing of dramatic propriety, the Poet himself discovering no preferences or repugnances concerning them. So in this play the dialogue throws out timber from which many diverse theories of government may be framed: and various political and philosophical sects may here meet together, and wrangle out their opposite tenets with themes and quotations drawn from the Poet's pages; just as his persons themselves wrangled out, with words or arms or both, the questions upon which they were actually divided. Nor does he in any sort play or affect to play the part of umpire between the wranglers: which of them has the truth, or the better cause, this, like a firm commissioner, so to speak, of Providence, he leaves to appear silently in the ultimate sumtotal of results. And so imperturbable is his fairness, so unswerving his impartiality, as almost to seem the offspring

VOL. II.

3

D

of a heartless and cynical indifference. Hence a French writer, Chasles, sets him down as "chiefly remarkable for a judgment so high, so firm, so uncompromising, that one is wellnigh tempted to impeach his coldness, and to find in this impassible observer something that may almost be called cruel towards the human race. In the historical pieces," continues he, "the picturesque, rapid, and vehement genius which produced them seems to bow before the higher law of a judgment almost ironical in its clear-sightedness. Sensibility to impressions, the ardent force of imagination, the eloquence of passion, these brilliant gifts of nature, which would seem destined to draw a poet beyond all limits, are subordinated in this extraordinary intelligence to a calm and almost deriding sagacity, that pardons nothing and forgets nothing."

The moral and political lessons designed in this piece run out into completeness in the later plays of the series, and so are to be mainly gathered from them. Here we have the scarce-perceptible germs of consequences which blossom and go to seed there; these consequences being scattered all along down the sequent years till nearly a century after, when the last of the Plantagenets met his death in Bosworth-field. Those lessons are found, not only transpiring inaudibly through the events and actions of the pieces that follow, but also in occasional notes of verbal discourse; as in the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, iii. 1, where Bolingbroke, worried almost to death with the persevering enmity of the Percys, so pointedly remembers the prediction of Richard:

"Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal

The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne,
The time shall not be many hours of age
More than it is, ere foul sin gathering head
Shall break into corruption: thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm, and give thee half,

It is too little, helping him to all;

And he shall think that thou, which know'st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,

Being ne'er so little urg'd, another way

To pluck him headlong from th' usurped throne.
The love of wicked friends converts to fear;

That fear to hate."

And the same thing comes out again, perhaps still more impressively, in the fact that Bolingbroke's conscience, when king, arms the irregularities of his son with the stings of a providential retribution: though aware of Prince Henry's noble qualities, and of the encouragement they offer, yet the remembrance of what himself has done fills him with apprehensions of the worst; so that he looks upon the Prince as "only mark'd for the hot vengeance and the rod of Heaven to punish his mistreadings."

The King and Bolingbroke are among the wisest and strongest of Shakespeare's historical delineations. Both are drawn at full length, and without omission of a feature or lineament that could anywise help us towards a thorough knowledge of the men; so far, that is, as regards the argument and action of the piece.

All through the first three Acts, Richard appears pretty thoroughly despicable, insomuch that it seems hardly possible he should ever rally to his side any honest stirrings either of pity or respect. He is at once crafty and credulous, indolent and arrogant, effeminate and aggressive; a hollow trifler while Fortune smiles, a wordy whimperer when she frowns. His utter falseness of heart in taking order for the combat, while secretly bent on preventing it; his arbitrary freakishness in letting it proceed till the combatants are on the point of crossing their lances, and then peremptorily arresting it; his petulant tyranny in passing the sentence of banishment on both the men, and his nervous, timid apprehensiveness in exacting from them an oath not to have any correspondence during their exile; his mean, scoffing insolence to the broken-hearted Gaunt, his ostentatious scorn of the dying man's reproofs, his impious levity in wishing him a speedy death, and his imperious,

headlong contempt of justice, and even of his own plighted faith, in seizing the Lancaster estates to his own use before the "time-honour'd Lancaster" is in the grave; — these things mark him out as a thorough-paced profligate, at once lawless and imbecile, who glories in spurning at whatwhat-|| ever is held most sacred by all true men.

Richard's character indeed, both as delivered in history and as drawn in the play, is mainly that of a pampered and emasculated voluptuary, presumptuous, hollow-hearted, prodigal, who cannot be got to harbour the idea that the nation exists for any purpose but to serve his private will and pleasure, and who thinks to divorce the rights and immunities of the crown from its cares and duties and legitimate honours. All this had the effect of bringing his personal character into contempt even before his administration became generally disliked. So Hume describes him as "indolent, profuse, addicted to low pleasures, spending his whole time in feasting and jollity, and dissipating, in idle show, or in bounties to favourites of no reputation, that revenue which the people expected to see him employ in enterprises directed to public honour and advantage." As already intimated, strong and independent supports he will nowise endure; and as he cannot live without supports of some kind, so he takes to climbing plants, "that seem in eating him to hold him up," and finally pull him to the ground. Such being his disposition, he naturally affects the society of befrilled and capering sprigs; and so draws about him a set of spendthrift minions, who stop his ear with flatteries, and inflame his blood with libidinous fancies; who make him insolent, imperious, and deaf to the voice of sober counsel and admonition, and draw him into a shallow and frivolous aping of foreign manners and fashions. Among his other traits of wantonness is an eager, restless haunting of public places and scenes of promiscuous familiarity; thus making himself "stale and cheap to vulgar company," till he grows "common-hackney'd in the eyes of men," so that, even "when he has occasion to be seen, hé

is but as the cuckoo is in June, heard, not regarded," and men hang their eyelids down before him, "being with his presence glutted, gorg'd, and full." This matter, to be sure, is not brought forward in the present play, and is perhaps rightly withheld, lest it should too much turn away our sympathies from the King in his hours of humiliation and sorrow; but it is aptly urged by Bolingbroke in the following piece, when he remonstrates with the Prince against those idle courses which seem likely to bring him into a similar predicament:

"The skipping King, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burn'd; carded his state,
Mingled his royalty, with capering fools;
Had his great name profaned with their scorns;
And gave his countenance, against his name,
To laugh at gibing boys, and stand the push
Of every beardles in comparative;
Grew a compan
That, being daily

They surfeited with

to the common streets :

low'd by men's eyes,

To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much."

Nevertheless Richard has in detail the parts, mental, moral, and practical, of a well-rounded manhood; and his endowments, severally regarded, are not without a fair measure both of strength and beauty: but there seems to be no principle of cohesion or concert among them; so that he acts in each of them by turns, never in all of them, hardly ever in two of them, at once. He thus moves altogether by fits and starts, and must still be in an excess, now on one side, now on another; and this because the tempering and moderating power of judgment is wanting; in a word, he has no equilibrium: a thought strikes him, and whirls him far off to the right, where another thought strikes him, and whirls him as far off to the left; and so he goes pitching and zigzagging hither and thither. This is not specially constitutional with him, but mainly the result