And bootless 'tis to tell

you-we will go;
Therefore we meet not now :-Then let me hear
Of you, my gentle cousin Westmoreland,
What yesternight our council did decree,
In forwarding this dear expedience*.

West. My liege, this haste was hot in question, And many limits 5 of the charge set down But yesternight: when, all athwart, there came A post from Wales, loaden with heavy news; Whose worst was,—that the noble Mortimer, Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight Against the irregular and wild Glendower, Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken, And a thousand of his people butchered: Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse, Such beastly, shameless transformation, By those Welshwomen done, as may not be, Without much shame, re-told or spoken of.

K. Hen. It seems then, that the tidings of this broil Brake off our business for the Holy Land.

West. This, match'd with other, did, my gracious lord;

For more uneven and unwelcome news

Came from the north, and thus it did import.
On Holy-rood day7, the gallant Hotspur there,
Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald,
That ever valiant and approved Scot,

At Holmedon met,

4 Expedition.

5 Limits here seem to mean appointments or determinations. 6 See Thomas of Walsingham, p. 557, or Holingshed, p. 528. 7 i. e. September 14th.

8 This Harry Percy was surnamed, for his often pricking, Henry Hotspur, as one that seldom times rested, if there were anie service to be done abroad.-Holinshed's Hist. of Scotland, p. 240.

9 Archibald Douglas, Earl Douglas.

Where they did spend a sad and bloody hour;
As by discharge of their artillery,

And shape of likelihood, the news was told ;
For he that brought them, in the very heat
And pride of their contention did take horse,
Uncertain of the issue any way.

K. Hen. Here is a dear and true-industrious friend, Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse, Stain'd 10 with the variation of each soil

Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours;
And he hath brought us smooth and welcome news.
The earl of Douglas is discomfited;

Ten thousand bold Scots, two-and-twenty knights,
Balk'd 11 in their own blood, did Sir Walter see
On Holmedon's plains: Of prisoners, Hotspur took
Mordake earl of Fife, and eldest son

To beaten Douglas 12, and the earls of Athol,
Of Murray, Angus, and Menteith 13.
And is not this an honourable spoil?
A gallant prize? ha, cousin, is it not?

10 No circumstance could have been better chosen to mark the expedition of Sir Walter. It is used by Falstaff in a similar manner, to stand stained with travel,' &c.

6

11 Balk'd in their own blood is heaped, or laid on heaps, in their own blood. A balk was a ridge or bank of earth standing up between two furrows; and to balk was to throw up the earth so as to form those heaps or banks. It was sometimes used in the sense of monceau, Fr. for a heap or hill. Pope has a similar thought in the Iliad

'On heaps the Greeks, on heaps the Trojans bled,

And thickening round them rise the hills of dead.'

12 Mordake earl of Fife, who was son to the duke of Albany, regent of Scotland, is here called the son of Earl Douglas, through a mistake, into which the poet was led by the omission of a comma in the passage from whence he took this account of the Scottish prisoners.

13 This is a mistake of Holinshed in his English History, for in that of Scotland, pp. 259. 262. 419, he speaks of the earl of Fife and Menteith as one and the same person.

West. In faith,

It is a conquest for a prince to boast of.

K. Hen. Yea, there thou mak'st me sad, and mak'st me sin

In envy that my lord Northumberland
Should be the father of so blest a son:

A son, who is the theme of honour's tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet fortune's minion, and her pride:
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonour stain the brow

Of
my young Harry. O, that it could be prov'd,
That some night-tripping fairy had exchang'd
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine-Percy, his-Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.
But let him from my thoughts:-What think you,coz',
Of this young Percy's pride? the prisoners 14,
Which he in this adventure hath surpris'd,

To his own use he keeps; and sends me word,
I shall have none but Mordake earl of Fife.

West. That is his uncle's teaching, this is Worcester,

Malevolent to you in all aspects 15;

Which makes him prune 16 himself, and bristle up The crest of youth against your dignity.

14 Percy had an exclusive right to these prisoners, except the earl of Fife. By the law of arms, every man who had taken any captive, whose redemption did not exceed ten thousand crowns, had him clearly to himself to acquit or ransom at his pleasure. But Percy could not refuse the earl of Fife to the king; for being a prince of the royal blood (son to the duke of Albany, brother to King Robert III.), Henry might justly claim him, by his acknowledged military prerogative.

15 An astrological allusion. Worcester is represented as a malignant star that influenced the conduct of Hotspur.

16 The metaphor is borrowed from falconry. A hawk is said to prune herself when she picks off the loose feathers and smooths

K. Hen. But I have sent for him to answer this:
And, for this cause, awhile we must neglect
Our holy purpose to Jerusalem,

Cousin, on Wednesday next our council we
Will hold at Windsor, so inform the lords:
But come yourself with speed to us again;
For more is to be said, and to be done,
Than out of anger can be uttered 17.
West. I will, my liege.

[Exeunt.

SCENE II.

The same.

Another Room in the Palace.

Enter HENRY, Prince of Wales, and FALSTAFF. Fal. Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?

P. Hen. Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou would'st truly know. What the devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flamecolour'd taffata; I see no reason why thou should'st be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

Fal. Indeed, you come near me now, Hal: for we, that take purses, go by the moon and seven

the rest: it is applied to other birds, and is perhaps so familiar as hardly to require a note. It is thus found in Greene's Metamorphosis, 1613:

'Pride makes the fowl to prune his feathers so.'

Milton uses to plume in the same sense:

'She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.'

17 That is, more is to be said than anger will suffer me to say: more than can issue from a mind disturbed like mine.

stars; and not by Phoebus,-he, that wandering knight so fair1. And, I pray thee, sweet wag, when thou art king,—as, God save thy grace (majesty, I should say; for grace thou wilt have none),

P. Hen. What, none?

Fal. No, by my troth; not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter.

P. Hen. Well, how then? come, roundly, roundly. Fal. Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us, that are squires of the night's body, be called thieves of the day's beauty; let us be— Diana's foresters 3, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon: And let men say, we be men of good government: being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we-steal.

P. Hen. Thou say'st well; and it holds well too; for the fortune of us, that are the moon's men, doth ebb and flow like the sea; being governed as the sea is, by the moon. As, for proof, now: A purse of gold most resolutely snatched on Monday night,

1 Falstaff, with great propriety, according to vulgar astronomy, calls the sun a wandering knight, and by this expression evidently alludes to some knight of romance; perhaps The Knight of the Sun; el Cavallero del Febo, a popular book in his time. The words may be part of some forgotten ballad.

2 Let not us who are body squires to the night (i. e. adorn the night) be called a disgrace to the day.' To take away the beauty of the day may probably mean to disgrace it. A squire of the body' originally signified the attendant of a knight. It became afterwards the cant term for a pimp. Falstaff puns on the words knight and beauty, quasi booty.

3

'Exile and slander are justly me awarded,

My wife and heire lacke lands and lawful right;
And me their lord made dame Diana's knight.'

This is the lament of Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, in The Mirror for Magistrates. Hall, in his Chronicles, says that certain persons who appeared as foresters in a pageant exhibited in the reign of King Henry VIII. were called Diana's knights.