Barnet, where he recovered the throne in spite of Warwick, and therefore had the better chance of keeping it. For this success he was much indebted to the perfidy of Clarence, who, having raised a large body of men by commission from Henry, but with the secret purpose of using them for Edward, a few days before threw off the mask, openly renouncing his father-in-law, and rejoining his brother. The death of Warwick at the battle of Barnet left Edward little to fear, and his security was scarce disturbed by the arrival of Queen Margaret, on the very day of that battle, with aid from France; which aid, together with what remained of Henry's late army, was despatched a few days after in the battle of Tewksbury. Prince Edward being murdered at the close of this last battle, and his father in the Tower about two weeks later, the Lancastrian line of princes was now extinct, so that its partisans had no inducement to prolong the terrible contest.

Further particulars of the history will be given from time to time in our notes. By a little attention to the dates it will be seen that throughout this play the Poet keeps to the actual order of events. And a more careful observation will readily perceive, that out of a large mass of materials Shakespeare judiciously selected such portions, and arranged them in such fashion, as might well convey in dramatic form the true historical scope and import of the whole. As the period brought forth little that was memorable save battles, all of which were marked by much the same bloodthirstiness of spirit, it was scarce possible to avoid an unusual degree of sameness in the action of the play; and the Poet seems to have made the most of whatever means were at hand for giving variety to the scenes. are the angry bickerings in parliament at the beginning; the cruel slaughter of young Rutland, and the fiendish mockeries heaped upon York, at Wakefield; the lyrical unbosomings of Henry when chidden from the field by Clifford, and when taken prisoner by the huntsmen; the wooing of lady Elizabeth by Edward, and the biting taunts and sarcasms which his brothers yent upon him touching

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his marriage; and especially the passages between Lewis, Margaret, Oxford, and Warwick, at the French court; in some of which the Poet seems rather to have overworked his matter of purpose to relieve and diversify the representation. Yet this play is by no means equal to the Second Part in variety of interest; and, but for the pungent seasoning sprinkled in here and there from the bad heart and busy brain of the precocious Richard, would be in some danger of perishing by its own monotony.

All through this dramatic series the delineation of the meek and inoffensive Henry is wrought out with studious care and consistency from the character ascribed to him in the Chronicles. His leading traits and dispositions are thus summed up in Holinshed: "He was of seemly stature, of body slender; his face beautiful, wherein continually was resident the bounty of mind with which he was inwardly indued. Of his own natural inclination he abhorred all the vices as well of the body as of the soul. He was plain, upright, far from fraud, wholly given to prayer, reading of Scriptures, and alms-deeds! of such integrity of life, that the bishop, which had been his confessor ten years, avouched that he had not all that time committed any mortal crime; so continent, as suspicion of unchaste life never touched him. So far he was from covetousness, that when the executors of his uncle, surnamed the rich cardinal, would have given him two thousand pounds, he plainly refused it, willing them to discharge the will of the departed, and would scarcely accept the same sum toward the endowing of his colleges in Cambridge and Eton. He was so pitiful, that when he saw the quarter of a traitor against his crown over Cripplegate he willed it to be taken away, with these words, I will not have any Christian so cruelly handled for my sake.' Many great offenses he willingly pardoned; and receiving at a time a great blow by a wicked man which compassed his death, he only said,— 'Forsooth, forsooth, ye do foully to smite a king anointed

The Poet's representation is in the main but a temperate

filling-up and coloring of this historical sketch and outline. The three plays embrace the whole period of the king's life; and in the child of the First Part a steady eye will readily discern the rudiments of what afterwards appears more fully developed in the man; the lines of his individuality meantime growing imperceptibly firmer, while years bring with them a riper thoughtfulness, and a more considerate, though hardly less passive virtue. At times he seems quite spirited and energetic, but this is generally under some sudden external pressure, and passes away as soon as he has time to temper and adjust his mind to the exigency. He shows considerable powers of thought and will, but somehow he cannot bring them to move athwart his sense of right; while at the same time such is his moral and intellectual candor as to render him inaccessible to the sophistries whereby men usually reconcile their conscience to the suggestions of interest or passion: so delicate and sensitive is his rectitude, that he can hardly bear of two evils to choose the least; and his position has always been such as obliged him either to act upon a choice of evils, or else to do nothing. And it is to be noted, withal, that there has ever been a disproportion between his nature and his circumstances, so that the latter could not properly educate the former; whatsoever native principles of energy there were in him having been rather choked down than called forth, by the rampant, undisciplined, overbearing energy of those about him. Thus he is an instance of a truly good man, altogether out of place; and himself fully aware of his unfitness for the place he is in, yet unable to leave it, for the very reason that the staying there involves him in continual self-sacrifice. He would still be a peacemaker, and therefore what he did still resulted in war, because in his circumstances war was the only effectual means of peace. The only impartial man in the kingdom, his impartiality, however, seems rather the offspring of weakness than of principle: yet, while his condition moves our pity, his piety and innocence secure him a share of respect; and we are apt to think of his situation as one where evil has

got such head that it must needs take its course and run itself out, there being no way for the good to conquer but by suffering.

One is strongly tempted to run a parallel between Henry VI and Richard II, as delineated by Shakespeare. To this temptation Hazlitt yielded outright, and perhaps we may as well follow him so far at least as to start the subject. The two kings closely resemble each other in a certain weakness of character, bordering on effeminacy, and this resemblance is made especially apparent by their similarity of state and fortune. Yet this very circumstance, which in almost any other hands would have caused a confounding of the men, seems only to have put Shakespeare upon a more careful discrimination of them. Richard is as selfish as he is weak, and weak, perhaps, partly because of his selfishness. With large and fine powers of mind, still his thinking never runs clear of self, but is all steeped to the core in personal regards; and to him a thing seems right and good only as, for private ends, he wishes to have it so: he can scarce see things to be true or false, but as they serve or thwart his own fancies and pleasures. And because his thoughts do not rise out of self, and stay in the contemplation of general and independent 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 degree 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; whereas, these being an essential part of that general truth which maketh strong, a sober and temperate regard to them is among the constituents of wisdom. For 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. This trait is finely exemplified in his talk with the keepers who have taken him captive, where

he urges the sanctity of an oath the more strictly, that in this instance it makes against himself. Had he been as rigid and exacting in his own case, as he is here in behalf of his rival, their oaths to himself would not have been broken; and for their breach of faith he blames his own remissness, as having caused them to wrong themselves.

Much has been said by one critic and another about the Poet's Lancastrian prejudices as manifested in these plays. One may well be curious to know whether those prejudices are to be held responsible for the portrait of Queen Margaret, wherein we have, so to speak, an abbreviature and sum-total of nearly all the worst vices of her time. The character, however life-like and striking its effect, is colored much beyond what sober history warrants: though some of the main features are not without a basis of fact, still the composition and expression as a whole has hardly enough of historical truth to render it a caricature. Bold, ferocious, and tempestuous, void alike of delicacy, of dignity, and of discretion, all the bad passions, out of which might be engendered the madness of civil war, seem to flock and hover about her footsteps. Her speech and action, however, impart a wonderful vigor and lustihood to the movement of the drama; and perhaps it was only by exaggerating her or some other of the persons into a sort of representative character, that the springs and processes of that long national bear-fight could be developed in a poetical and dramatic form. Her penetrating intellect and unrestrainable volubility discourse forth the motives and principles of the combatant factions; while in her remorseless impiety and revengeful ferocity is impersonated, as it were, the very genius and spirit of the terrible conflict. So that we may regard her as, in some sort, an ideal concentration of that murderous ecstasy which seized upon the nation. Nor is it inconsiderable that popular tradition, sprung from the reports of her enemies, and cherished by patriotic feeling, had greatly overdrawn her wickedness, that it might have whereon to father the evils resulting