very nearly allied to utter incapacity; and that the thin partition between weakness and idiocy was sometimes wholly removed. But Shakspere has never painted Henry under this aspect; he has shown us a king with virtues unsuited to the age in which he lived; with talents unfitted for the station in which he moved; contemplative amidst friends and foes hurried along by a distempered energy; peaceful under circumstances that could have no issue but in appeals to arms; just in thought, but powerless to assert even his own sense of right amidst the contests of injustice which hemmed him in. The entire conception of the character of Henry, in connexion with the circumstances to which it was subjected, is to be found in the Parliament-scene of 'The Third Part of Henry VI.' This scene is copied from 'The Contention,' with scarcely the addition or alteration of a word. We may boldly affirm that none but Shakspere could have depicted with such marvellous truth the weakness, based upon a hatred of strife—the vacillation, not of imbecile cunning, but of clearsighted candour-the assertion of power through the influence of habit, but of a power trembling even at its own authority-the glimmerings of courage utterly extinguished by the threats of "armed men," and proposing compromise even worse than war. We request our readers to peruse this scene, and endeavour to recollect if any poet besides Shakspere ever presented such a reality in the exhibition of a mind whose principles have no coherency and no self-reliance; one moment threatening and exhorting his followers to revenge, the next imploring them to be patient; now urging his rival to peace, and now threatening war; turning from the assertion of his title to acknowledge its weakness; and terminating his display of 66 'words, frowns, and threats" with

"Let me but reign in quiet while I live." It was weakness such as this which inevitably raised up the fiery partisans which the poet has so wonderfully depicted; the bloody Clifford the "she-wolf of France”—the dissembling York-the haughty Warwick-the voluptuous Edward-and, last and most ter

rible of all, he that best explains his own character, "I am myself alone."

One by one the partisans that are thus marshalled by the poet in the Parliamentscene of London are swept away by the steady progress of that justice which rides over their violence and their subtlety. The hollow truce is broken. Margaret is ready to assail York in his castle; York is prepared for the field, having learned from the precocious sophist Richard how " an oath is of no moment." Now are let loose all the " dogs of war." The savage Clifford strikes down the innocent Rutland; the more savage Margaret dips her napkin in his blood. York perishes under the prolonged retribution that awaited the ambition that dallied with murder and rebellion. Clifford, to whom nothing is so odious as "harmful pity," falls in the field of Towton, where the son was arrayed against the father, and the father against the son; and the king, more "woe-begone" than the unwilling victims of ambition, moralises upon the "happy life" of the "homely swain." The great actors of the tragedy are changed. Edward and Richard have become the leaders of the Yorkists, with Warwick, "the king-maker," to rest upon. Henry has fled to Scotland; Margaret to France. Then is unfolded another leaf of that Sibylline book. Edward is on the throne careless of everything but self-gratification; despising his supporters, offending even his brothers. Warwick takes arms against him; Clarence deserts to Warwick; Richard alone remains faithful, sneering at his brother, and laughing in the concealment of his own motives for fidelity. Edward is a fugitive, and finally a captive; but Richard redeems him, and Clarence again cleaves to him. The second revolution is accomplished. The "king-maker" yields his "body to the earth" in the field of Barnet; Margaret and her son become captives in the plains near Tewksbury. Then comes the terrible hour to the unhappy queen-that hour which she foresaw not when she gave the "bloody napkin" to the wretched York

that hour whose intensity of suffering reached its climax of expression in "You have no children." But Richard is fled

"To make a bloody supper in the Tower."

The three that stab the defenceless Edward equally desire another murder; but one is to do the work. It is accomplished.

And here then, according to the critical authorities that we have long followed in England, rested the history of "The Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster,' as far as the original author carried that history. It was to conclude with deeds of violence, as fearful and as atrocious as any we have yet witnessed. The slaughter of Rutland by the Lancastrian Clifford was to find its parallel in the stabbing of Edward by the three brothers of York; the butchery of York, amidst the taunts and execrations of Margaret and her followers, was to be equalled by the sudden murder of the desolate Henry in his prison-house. There was to be no retribution for these later crimes. The justice which had so long presided over this eventful story was now to sleep. If there was vengeance in reserve, it was to be distant and shadowy. The scene was to close with "stately triumphs;" drums and trumpets" were to sound; Hope was to display to the conqueror her visions of "lasting joy." If the poet had here closed his chronicle, he would have been an imperfect interpreter of his own idea. We open another leaf of the same volume, and all becomes clear and consistent.

66

To understand the character of the Richard III. of Shakspere, we must have traced its development by the author of 'The Contention.'

The character was a creation of the early author; the unity was preserved between the last of these four dramas, which everybody admits to be the work of the "greatest name in all literature," in an unbroken link with the previous drama, which everybody has been in the habit of assigning to some obscure and very inferior writer. We We are taught to open 'The Life and Death of King Richard III.,' and to look upon the extraordinary being who utters the opening lines as some new creation, set before us in the perfect completeness of self-formed villainy. We have not learnt to trace the growth of the mind of this bold bad man; to see how his bravery became gradually darkened with ferocity; how his prodigious

| talents insensibly allied themselves with cunning and hypocrisy; how, in struggling for his house, he ultimately proposed to struggle for himself; how, in fact, the bad ambition would be naturally kindled in his mind, to seize upon the power which was sliding from the hands of the voluptuous Edward, and the "simple, plain Clarence." He that wrote

"I have no brothers, I am like no brothers; And this word love, which greybeards term divine,

Be resident in men like one another, And not in me; I am myself alone"prepared the way for the Richard that was to tell us

"If I fail not in my deep intent,

Clarence hath not another day to live:
Which done, God take King Edward to his
mercy,

And leave the world for me to bustle in!"

The poet of the 'Richard III.' goes straightforward to his object; for he has made all the preparation in the previous dramas. No gradual development is wanting of the character which is now to sway the action. The struggle of the houses up to this point has been one only of violence; "The big

and it was therefore anarchical. boned " Warwick, and the fiery Clifford, alternately presided over the confusion. The power which changed the

"Dreadful marches to delightful measures" seemed little more than accident. But Richard proposed to himself to subject events to his domination, not by courage alone, or activity, or even by the legitimate exercise of a commanding intellect, but by the clearest and coolest perception of the strength which he must inevitably possess who unites the deepest sagacity to the most thorough unscrupulousness in its exercise, and is an equal master of the weapons of force and of craft. The character of Richard is essentially different from any other character which Shakspere has drawn. His bloody violence is not that of Macbeth; nor his subtle treachery that of Iago. It is difficult to say whether he derives a greater satisfaction from the success of his crimes, or from

the consciousness of power which attends the working of them. This is a feature which he holds in common with Iago. But then he does not labour with a "motiveless malignity," as lago does. He has no vague suspicions, no petty jealousies, no remembrance of slight affronts, to stimulate him to a disproportioned and unnatural vengeance. He does not hate his victims; but they stand in his way, and, as he does not love them, they perish. He chuckles in the fortitude which this alienation from humanity confers upon

him :

That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing; I marvel that her grace did leave it out." Villains of the blackest dye disguise their crimes even from themselves. Richard shrinks not from their avowal to others, for a purpose. The wooing of Lady Anne is, perhaps, the boldest thing in the Shaksperean drama. It is perpetually on the verge of the impossible; yet the marvellous consistency of character with which it is conducted renders the whole of this conduct probable, if we once get over the difficulty which startles Richard himself:

"Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? Was ever woman in this humour won?" His exultation at having accomplished his purpose by the sole agency of "the plain devil, and dissembling looks" is founded on his unbounded reliance upon his mental powers; and that reliance is even strong enough to afford that he should abate so much of his self-love as to be joyous in the contemplation of his own bodily deformity.

It is the result of the peculiar organization of Richard's mind, formed as it had been by circumstances as well as by nature, that he invariably puts himself in the attitude of one who is playing a part. It is this circumstance which makes the character (clumsy even as it has been made by the joinery of Cibber) such a favourite on the stage. It cannot be over-acted. It was not without a purpose that the author of 'The Contention' put in the mouth of Henry "What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?"

Burbage, the original player of Richard, according to Bishop Corbet's description of his host at Bosworth *, was identified with him. This aptitude for subjecting all his real thoughts and all his natural impulses to the exigencies of the scene of life in which he was to play the chief part, equally govern his conduct whether he is wooing Lady Anne-or denouncing the relations of the queen-or protesting before the king,

*"T is death to me to be at enmity"—

or mentioning the death of Clarence as a thing of course—or begging the strawberries from the Bishop of Ely when he is meditating the execution of Hastings-or appearing on the Tower walls in rusty armour-or rejecting the crown which the citizens present to him-or dismissing Buckingham with "Thou troublest me, I am not in the vein"or soliciting the mother of his murdered nephews to win for him her daughter,

*"Mine host was full of ale and history,
And in the morning when he brought us nigh,
Where the two Roses join'd, you would suppose
Chaucer ne'er made the Romaunt of the Rose.
Hear him. See you yon wood? There Richard lay
With his whole army. Look the other way,
And lo! while Richmond in a bed of gorse
Encamp'd himself all night, and all his force,
Upon this hill they met. Why, he could tell
The inch where Richmond stood, where Richard fell.
Besides what of his knowledge he could say,
He had authentic notice from the play;
Which I might guess by marking up the ghosts,
And policies not incident to hosts;
But chiefly by that one perspicuous thing
Where he mistook a player for a king.

For when he would have said, King Richard died,
And call'd, A horse! a horse! he Burbage cried."

It is only in the actual presence of a powerful enemy that Richard displays any portion of his natural character. His bravery required no dissimulation to uphold it. In his last battle-field he puts forth all the resources of his intellect in a worthy direction. But the retribution is fast approaching. It was not enough for offended justice that he should die as a hero: the terrible tortures of conscience were to precede the catastrophe. The drama has exhibited all it could exhibit -the palpable images of terror haunting a mind already anticipating the end. "Radcliff, I fear, I fear," is the first revelation of the true inward man to a fellow-being. But the terror is but momentary :

"Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls."

To the last the poet exhibits the supremacy of Richard's intellect, his ready talent, and his unwearied energy. The tame address of Richmond to his soldiers, and the spirited exhortation of Richard, could not have been the result of accident.

It appears to us, then, that the complete development of the character of Richard was absolutely essential to the completion of the great idea upon which the poet constructed these four dramas. There was a man to be raised up out of the wild turbulence of the long contest-not cruel, after the mere fashion of a Clifford's cruelty-not revengeful, according to the passionate impulses of the revenge of a Margaret and of an Edward -not false and perjured, in imitation of the irresolute weakness of a Clarence-but one who was cruel, and revengeful, and treacherous, upon the deepest premeditation and with the most profound hypocrisy. That man was also to be so confident in his intellectual power, that no resolve was too daring to be acted upon, no risk too great to be encountered. Fraud and force were to go hand in hand, and the one was to exterminate what the other could not win. This man was to be an instrument of that justice which was to preside to the end of this "sad eventful history." By his agency was the house of York to fall, as the house of Lancaster had fallen. The innocent by him were to be

This was the poetical faith of the author of these dramas-the power of the curse was associated with the great idea of a presiding Fate. But Margaret's were not the only curses. Richard himself, in one passage, where he appears to make words exhibit thoughts and not conceal them, refers to the same power of a curse- -that of his father, insulted in his death-hour by the scorns of Margaret, and moved to tears by her atrocious cruelty. This is the assertion of the equal justice which is displayed in the dramatic issue of these fearful events; not justice upon the house of York alone, which Horace Walpole thinks Shakspere strove to exhibit in deference to Tudor prejudices, but justice upon the house of Lancaster as well as the house of York, for those individual crimes of the leaders of each house that had made a charnel-ground of England. When that justice had asserted its supremacy, tranquillity was to come. The poet has not chosen to exhibit the establishment of law and order in the astute government of Henry VII.; but in his drama of 'Henry VIII.' he has carried us onward to a new state of things, when the power of the sword was at an end. He came as near to his own times as was either safe or fitting; but he contrasts his own times with the days of civil fury, in a prophetic view of the reign of Elizabeth :

"In her days, every man shall eat in safety,

Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours."+

*Richard III.,' Act 1., Scene III. + Henry VIII.,' Act v., Scene IV.