of bad education and an unconscientious way of life. In his case, the discipline of order and virtue has been forestalled by a planting of loose and giddy thoughts; and long indulgence in voluptuous arts, and the instilled poison of wanton imaginations, have dissolved the bands of selfrestraint, and induced a habit of setting pleasure before duty, and of making reason wait on passion; and this has wrought a certain chronic sleaziness into his texture, and rendered him more and more the sport of contradictory impulses and humours.

Richard is not without bright and just thoughts, but he cannot for any length of time maintain a reasonable propriety of thought. Hence his discourse presents a strange medley of sense and puerility; and we often have a gem of mind or a beautiful image with a childish platitude treading on its heels. So too he is lofty and abject, pious and profane, bold and pusillanimous, by fits; has spasms of elation swiftly alternating with spasms of dejection, and is ever running through the gamut of sharps and flats; "every feeling being abandoned for its direct opposite upon the pressure of external accident." This supreme trait of weakness is most tellingly displayed in his dialogue with Carlisle, Aumerle, Salisbury, and Scroop, just after his return from Ireland, when, upon learning how Bolingbroke is carrying all before him, he vibrates so rapidly between the extremes of ungrounded hope and unmanly despair. His spirit soars in the faith that, for every man in arms with Bolingbroke, "God for His Richard hath in heavenly pay a glorious angel"; but when, a moment after, he finds that, so far from angels mustering to his aid, even men are deserting him, all his faith instantly vanishes in pale-faced terror and dismay.

Therewithal he is ever inviting hostile designs by openly anticipating them, or by futile or ill-judged precautions against them. So in his swearing the two banished Dukes not to plot or join hands against him during their exile. So too when Bolingbroke comes, avowedly and with just

cause, to reclaim his own, and to redress the bleeding State; he discovers no purpose of grasping the crown, till Richard's weak-kneed concession or acquiescence puts it in his mind, and fairly wooes him to it; that is, the King presumes the design is to unseat him, and thereby prompts it. Thus the apprehension of being deposed, instead of stiffening up his manly parts, at once deposes his intellect and spirit. When a bold and resolute self-assertion, or a manly and stout-hearted defiance would outdare and avert the peril, he just quails and cowers; and his deprecating of the blow before it comes is a tacit pledge of submission when it comes. He himself tells Bolingbroke, "they well deserve to have, that know the strong'st and surest way to get"; while his behaviour just illustrates how they deserve not to have, who use the strong'st and surest way to lose.

But perhaps the most mark-worthy point in his character is, that the prospect or the pressure of adversity or distress, instead of kindling any strain of manhood in him, or of having any bracing and toning effect upon his soul, only melts it into a kind of sentimental pulp. Suffering does not even develop the virtue of passive fortitude in him: at its touch, he forthwith abandons himself to a course of passionate weakness. And he is so steeped in voluptuous habits, that he must needs be a voluptuary even in his sorrow, and make a luxury of woe itself: pleasure has so thoroughly mastered his spirit, that he cannot think of bearing pain as a duty or an honour, but merely as a license for the pleasure of maudlin self-compassion: so he hangs over his griefs, hugs them, nurses them, buries himself in them, as if the sweet agony thereof were to him a glad refuge from the stings of self-reproach, or a dear release from the exercise of manly thought. This, I take it, is the true explanation of the fact, that when he is sick in fortune, and sees "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law," he forthwith turns a moralistic day-dreamer and fancy-monger, and goes to spending his wits in a sort of holiday of poetical, selfbrooding tearfulness. His spirit wantons in running self

pleasing divisions upon sadness, as if to beguile the sense and memory of his follies and crimes. And such an ingenious working of sentimental embroidery is perhaps the natural resort of a profligate without means.

It is also to be noted that in his reverse of fortune Richard's mind is altogether self-centred; and he is so becharmed with his self-pity, that he has no thought to spare for those whom his fall has dragged down into ruin along with him. But this is only part and parcel of his general character; which is that of "a mind deeply reflective in its misfortunes, but wanting the guide to all sound reflection, the power of going out of himself, under the conduct of a loftier reason than could endure to dwell upon the merely personal." In this respect, one may well be tempted to run a parallel, as indeed Hazlitt has done, between Richard the Second and Henry the Sixth as drawn by Shakespeare. The two Kings closely resemble each other in a certain weakness of character bordering on effeminacy; and this resemblance is made specially apparent by their similarity of state and fortune. Yet this similarity seems to have put the Poet upon a more careful discrimination of the men. Richard is as selfish as he is weak, and weak partly because of his selfishness. With goodly powers of mind, still his thinking never runs clear of self, but is all steeped to the core in personal regards; he reads men and things altogether through the medium of his own wishes and desires. And because his thoughts do not rise out of self, and stay in the contemplation of general truth, therefore it is that his course of life runs so tearingly a-clash with the laws and conditions of his place. With Henry, on the other hand, disinterestedness is pushed to the de gree of an infirmity. He seems to perceive and own truth all the more willingly where it involves a sacrifice of his personal interests and rights. But a man, especially a king, cannot be wise for others, unless he be so for himself. Thus Henry's weakness seems to spring in part from an excessive disregard of self. He permits the laws to suffer,

and in them the people, partly because he cannot vindicate them without, in effect, taking care of his own cause. And when others break their oaths to him, he blames his own remissness as having caused them to wrong themselves.

But Richard is at last felt to be the victim as well as the author of wrong; and the Poet evidently did not mean that the wrongs he has done should lie so heavy upon us as to preclude commiseration for the wrong he suffers. Our sympathies are indeed deeply moved in the wretched man's behalf. This, I suppose, is because the spectacle of fallen greatness, of humiliation, and distress, however merited, is a natural object of pity; while, again, honest pity naturally magnetizes other sentiments into unison with itself. The heart must be hard indeed that does not respond to the pathos of York's account of the discrowned monarch's ride into London:

"No man cried, God save him!
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home;
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head;
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off, -
His face still combating with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience,

That, had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
And barbarism itself have pitied him."

And it is rather surprising how much he redeems him-
self in our thoughts by his manly outburst of resentment
in the parliament-scene, when the sneaking Northumber-
land so meanly persecutes him to "ravel out his weav'd-up
follies." Then too his faults and infirmities are so much
those of our common humanity, that even through them he s
creeps into our affections, and spins round us the ties of
brotherhood. Nor, in truth, is his character without beau-
tiful parts; and when affliction brings these out, as night
does the stars, he puts forth claims to gentle regard which
the judgment is no less prompt to ratify than the heart to

own.

In collision with such a compact, close-knit, sure-footed structure as Bolingbroke, it is no wonder that Richard's brittle, stumbling, loose-jointed fabric soon goes to pieces. In one of his paroxysms of regal conceit, he flatters himself that not all the water in the rough-rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king"; but his fate is a pregnant warning that in the eye of Heaven, ay, and of men too, a king can wash off his own consecration by flagitious, persistent misgovernment, and can effectually discrown himself by prostituting the intrusted symbol of a nation's sovereignty into an instrument of wilful and despotic selfindulgence. Richard has thought to stand secure in the strength of his good right, and would not see how this might be practically annulled by bad use. By not respecting his great office, he has taught the people to despise his person, and has set them to longing for a man in his place who will be a king in soul as well as in title. Thus the king by inheritance finds himself hopelessly unkinged in an unequal struggle with a king by nature and merit.

Bolingbroke is obviously the moving and controlling spirit of the drama. Every thing waits upon his firm-set and tranquil potency of will, and is made alive with his silent, inly-working efficacy of thought and purpose. He sets the action on foot, shapes its whole course, and ties up all its lines at the close; himself riding, in calm and conscious triumph, the whirlwind he has had a hand in raising. Bold, crafty, humble, and aspiring, he is also brimful of energy, yet has all his forces thoroughly in hand, so that he uses them, and is never mastered by them. His vessel is so well-timbered and so tight-built, that it never springs aleak; either from nature or from purpose, perhaps from both, he takes the way of spreading himself by deeds, not by discourse; plans industriously, but says nothing about it; and as he prates not of his mental whereabout, so you never know what he is thinking of or driving at, till his thoughts have compassed their drift, and overtaken their ends: consequently he remains throughout the play an