The brother, Laertes, has always been one of the most ill-used of all the great dramatist's creations. He has always been made ferocious instead of quick in feeling. It would be difficult to contrive more pungent wrongs than he has to suffer, and such as would make a man, full of the worldly falsehood of punctilious courage, less nice about the means. Laertes invested himself with interest in the beginning by his anxious love, his fear for his sister, not words spoken merely, but earnest feelings expressed. He was tender, anxious, doting on her, her honour, her youth, her beauty, her fate. In the latter part his rage became concentrated and terrible from the suppression of his tears; the anger itself was as grave as Macduff's, the deadly revenge was the prompting of the demon king ready to use it for his own fell purpose.

I could tell you more, for who could see Hamlet played and not have more to say about it? But even what I have said, suppose you to know the play throughout, and to care more about it than the average of readers or auditors, perchance. But, this theatre of yours, may I ask you, where66 In my mind's eye, Horatio,' as you knew before you asked. But that mind's eye has been informed by what every one may consult for himself. Shakespeare expected to be misunderstood in this play. He has commented himself on almost every scene, by repeating all the less obvious ones in a short description. Look through the text.

Aye.

I do not say that some performers have not done this diligently, but to "play out the play," as it should be.

Why you will end as you begun; you will say there are “a few good actors wanted!"

FIAT JUSTITIA!

'Twas when the moon was darkened o'er with clouds of lurid hueTwas when in all the blackened sky you'd see no speck of blue'Twas when the blast swept searching past, across the lonesome moor, Bearing its weight of snow and sleet to sixty houseless poor;

Then rose the wail, upon the gale, of many a shivering mother,
And quick the wail, the sharp white hail, in stifling sobs would smother.
But, fierce and loud, the curses proud of savage manly wrath
Might make the brave Christ's ben'son crave upon that grisly path.

For there were deeds of justice done upon a wintry day,

And twenty hovels, black and bare, without the thatch-roof lay.
It was the law, and bayonets saw-the bayonets of the free!—
The right asserted of the good who sought his failing fee.

Knaves, famished, lean, with skin not clean, lank hair and horny hand,
From sire to son scant life had won upon a sterile land.

For twice a hundred years they toiled, in squalor and in grief,
And only paid full twice the meed of many a fertile fief.

But blight had fallen upon the field; this year their rent-staff died;
Potato, pig, the osier twig, drooped, plague-struck-(woe betide !)
The landlord (just and stern was he, and fitly proud of blood)
Bethought him well, time now to quell a sordid, useless brood.
Twas thus that night the deed of right saw finished full and fair,
And not a wretch a limb might stretch upon a covered lair.
And as the curse grew wild and worse for savage kindred dead,
The good man calls his house to prayers, and, thankful, goes to bed.

But now was haste upon the waste, gaunt faces, glistening eyes,
Black-bearded men shake hands, and then they count who sinks and
dies.

Next day the sun shines cheerful down, as e'er shined wintry sun ;
But under that fair, happy sun, a murther dark is done!

With cheerful face of health and grace (true symbols of the good),
The righteous master hies him forth to earn his zest for food;
And here and there, with bounteous air, he hails a neighbour's bow ;
But one sad spot he visits not (his heart too soft I trow).

While ambling now, with musing brow, a briary bank before,
One yell-like as the fiend of hell!-lent force to that fell roar!

The good man falls-two death-winged balls his “fair round" body pierce,

And o'er the bank, lean, eager, lank, just peer two faces fierce.

A month hath waned,—the turf, blood-stained, has claimed the price of

sin

Two ghastly corpses, on a tree, in sickening silence swing.
The good man's rest is in oaken chest, where all his fathers slept-
In many a page, by the county sage who rules the news-sheet wept.

TLS.

266

A HISTORY FOR YOUNG ENGLAND.*

What a pitie is it to see a proper gentleman to have such a crick in his neck that he cannot look backward. Yet no better is he who cannot see behind him the actions which long since were performed. History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or grey hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Yea, it not onely maketh things past, present; but inableth one to make a rationall conjecture of things to come. For this world affordeth no new accidents, but in the same sense wherein we call it a new moon; which is the old one in another shape, and yet no other than what had been formerly. Old actions return again, furbished over with some new and different circumstances.-FULLER

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH.

JOHN, SURNAMED LACKLAND.

1199-1216. JOHN was present at the death-bed of Cœur de Lion; and the dying king was said to have declared him successor to the throne, and heir to one-third of his treasures. The latter he seized at Chinon; and passing into Touraine, Maine, and Anjou, was met in that ancient territory of the Plantagenets by the claim of his nephew Arthur. This adverse confederacy, headed by the Breton people, had a formidable aspect; and John, content with sacking the city of Mans, and burning down that of Angers, hastened into Normandy and Acquitaine, where, by the influence of friends whom he had long secretly cherished in those provinces, and backed by the hereditary rights of his mother, his sovereignty was admitted. He received the ducal coronet and sword at Rouen from the hands of the archbishop. He had been Earl; he was now Duke; and by God's teeth (his favourite oath) he swore he would be King.

I have shown the growth of a power in England, during the last reign, claiming to overawe the crown and compel the responsibility of its ministers. But this power was never distinctly put in motion against the succession of John. When, indeed, on Archbishop Hubert's arrival with the letters from Normandy, justiciary Fitz-Peter commanded all freemen to swear allegiance to the duke, there was enough hesitation among the

* Continued from p. 84, Vol. III.

prelates and barons least affected to John's interest to render necessary the summoning of a great council at Northampton; but there does not seem to have been much difficulty in procuring from this council, an unanimous resolution to swear fealty to John, Duke of Normandy, on the condition that the present rights of each individual should be respected. In truth, though the subsequent misfortunes and sorrowful death of Arthur largely moved sympathy in England, there was never any formidable stand attempted on the ground of his right to the throne. The battle was fought in the foreign provinces. Here, while some might have thought his claim superior to his uncle's; and many were certainly convinced of the superior weight of the frequent written testimonies of Cœur de Lion for his succession, as compared with the equivocal dying declaration alleged by John; there was hardly one man of influence that would have drawn the sword for him, on any such principle as that the crown of England was heritable property. The genius of the country was repugnant to that notion. It has been shown in this history, with what care, at each successive coronation since the Conquest, the form of the choice of the people was preserved; it will have been seen that of the five kings on whom the English crown has descended since the Conquest, four have been constrained to rest their most availing title on that popular choice or recognition; but the most emphatic declaration of the principle, was reserved for the coronation of John.

He landed at Shoreham on the 25th of May, and two days afterward was crowned at Westminster. As I have before remarked, his right was in no particular admitted till after this ceremony. He was earl, until he assumed the ducal coronet; he was duke, until the national council of England, speaking through Hubert of Canterbury, invested him at Westminster with the English crown. This crown,' said that distinguished prelate, before he placed it on the head of John, is not the property of ' any particular person. It is the gift of the nation, which elects, 'generally from the members of the reigning family, the prince 'who appears in the existing circumstances the most deserving of ' royalty. No preceding events can entitle any one to succeed to 'this crown if he be not chosen king by the body of the nation (ab universitate regni electus), according to the example of Saul and David, who were not even of royal race. We have this day ❝ assembled to exercise that great duty, and have elected for our

sovereign John, Duke of Normandy, brother of the deceased 'king.' It is added by Hoveden and Mathew of Paris, from whom this statement is derived, that the duke, without starting the question of his birth or that of his brother's alleged will, distinctly signified his assent to these principles; and that then, having taken the customary oaths to protect the church and govern justly, a shout of Long live the king!' rang through the crowded abbey, and was echoed by the throng outside.

It was characteristic of the already most notorious meanness and duplicity of John, that in the preamble to a law which he published on the seventh of the following month at Northampton, he was careful to unite, with his popular title, the titles he had thus renounced. God had raised him to the throne, he said, which belonged to him as well by hereditary right, as through the unanimous consent and favour of the clergy and the people. But the solemn act of the 27th of May could not thus be revoked or evaded. Speed, with his patient industry and narrow vision, calls that act a second seed-plot of treasons;' but it so happens, throughout our English history, that Treasons have been the second seed-plot of Liberty. Other critics have imagined John's coronation a mere arrangement of conditional fealty specially restricted to him; the sole temptation to elect him in preference to his nephew being the consideration that less was to be looked for from a legitimate monarch, in the way of civil restitution, than from one who held by elective tenure. But these reasoners overlook, not only the fact that the law of succession as between a living brother and a dead brother's child was by no means settled at this time, but that the choice of a monarch on exclusively hereditary grounds would have been the exception, and not the rule. If anything, beyond the objection to entrusting sovereignty to a child and a woman (especially such a woman as Constance of Brittany), induced the preference of John, it seems most likely to have been the anticipation of a possible and not distant struggle between the throne and its feudal dependencies; and the sense of how much the latter would be strengthened by an incompetent and feeble occupant of the former. For how stood the government of England, when placed in the hands of John ?

At the commencement of this reign, the balance of power between the various grades of feudal society, as in a great degree established by the discreet and powerful administration of Henry the Second, had been wholly relaxed and unsettled by John's