Stoop low within those bounds we have o'erlook'd,
And calmly run on in obedience,

Even to our ocean, to our great king John.-
My arm shall give thee help to bear thee hence,
For I do see the cruel pangs of death

Right in thine eye.-Away, my friends! New flight,

And happy newness, that intends old right.
[Exeunt, leading off MELUN.
SCENE V.-The Same. The French Camp.
Enter LEWIS, and his Train.

Lew. The sun of heaven, methought, was loath to set,

But stay'd, and made the western welkin blush,
When English measur'd backward their own ground,
In faint retire. O! bravely came we off,
When with a volley of our needless shot,
After such bloody toil we bid good night,
And wound our tattering colours clearly up,
Last in the field, and almost lords of it!
Enter a Messenger.

Mess. Where is my prince, the Dauphin?
Lew.
Here.-What news?
Mess. The count Melun is slain: the English
lords,

By his persuasion, are again fallen off;
And your supply, which you have wish'd so long,
Are cast away, and sunk, on Goodwin sands.

Lew. Ah, foul shrewd news!-Beshrew thy very heart!

I did not think to be so sad to-night,

As this hath made me.-Who was he, that said,
King John did fly an hour or two before
The stumbling night did part our weary powers?
Mess. Whoever spoke it, it is true, my lord.
Lew. Well; keep good quarter, and good care
to-night:

The day shall not be up so soon as I,
To try the fair adventure of to-morrow. [Exeunt.

SCENE VI.-An open Place in the neighbourhood of Swinstead-Abbey. Night.

Enter the Bastard, and HUBERT, severally. Hub. Who's there? speak, ho! speak quickly, or I shoot.

Bast. A friend.-What art thou?
Hub.

Of the part of England.

Hub. Why, here walk I, in the black brow of night, To find you out. Bast. Brief, then; and what's the news? Hub. O! my sweet sir, news fitting to the night, Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible.

Bast. Show me the very wound of this ill news: 1 am no woman; I'll not swoon at it.

Hub. The king, I fear, is poison'd by a monk : I left him almost speechless, and broke out To acquaint you with this evil, that you might The better arm you to the sudden time, Than if you had at leisure known of this.

Bast. How did he take it? who did taste to him?

Hub. A monk, I tell you; a resolved villain, Whose bowels suddenly burst out: the king Yet speaks, and, peradventure, may recover.

Bast. Whom didst thou leave to tend his majesty? Hub. Why, know you not? the lords are all come back,

And brought prince Henry in their company;
At whose request the king hath pardon'd them,
And they are all about his majesty.

Bast. Withhold thine indignation, mighty heaven,
And tempt us not to bear above our power.
I'll tell thee, Hubert, half my power this night,
Passing these flats, are taken by the tide;
These Lincoln washes have devoured them:
Myself well-mounted hardly have escap'd.
Away, before: conduct me to the king;
I doubt, he will be dead or ere I come.

[Exeunt.

Straight let us seek, or straight we shall be sought: The Dauphin rages at our very heels.

Sal. It seems you know not, then, so much as we. The cardinal Pandulph is within at rest, Who half an hour since came from the Dauphin, And brings from him such offers of our peace As we with honour and respect may take, With purpose presently to leave this war.

Bast. He will the rather do it, when he sees
Ourselves well sinewed to our defence.

Sal. Nay, it is in a manner done already;
For many carriages he hath despatch'd
To the sea-side, and put his cause and quarrel
To the disposing of the cardinal:

With whom yourself, myself, and other lords,
If you think meet, this afternoon will post
To consummate this business happily.

Bast. Let it be so.-And you, my noble prince,
With other princes that may best be spar'd,
Shall wait upon your father's funeral.

P. Hen. At Worcester must his body be interr'd; For so he will'd it.

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ACT I.-SCENE I.

"In my behaviour"-"In my behaviour" means, In the words and actions that I am now going to use. So, in the fifth act of this play, the Bastard says to the French king

Now hear our English king,

For thus his royalty doth speak in me.

"The thunder of my cannon shall be heard."

"We have the same anachronism in HAMLET and in MACBETH. It is scarcely necessary to tell our readers that gunpowder was invented about a century later than the time of John, and that the first battle-field in which cannon were used is commonly supposed to have been that of Cressy. And yet the dramatic Poet could not have well avoided this literal violation of propriety, both here and in the second act, when he talks of 'bullets wrapp'd in fire.' He uses terms which were familiar to his audience, to present a particular image to their senses. Had he, instead of cannon, spoken of the mangonell and the petraria,-the stone-flinging machines of the time of John,-he would have addressed himself to the very few who might have appreciated his exactness; but his words would have fallen dead upon the ears of the many. We have other anachronisms in this play, which we may as well dismiss at once, in connexion with the assertion of the principle upon which they are to be defended. In the first act, we have the half-faced groat' of Henry VII., and the three-farthing rose' of Elizabeth. The mention of these coins conveys a peculiar image, which must have been rejected if the Poet had been bound by the same rules that govern an antiquary. So in the fifth act, where the Dauphin says he has the best cards for the game,' the Poet had to choose between the adoption of an allusion full of spirit and perfectly intelligible, or the substitution of some prosaic and feeble form of speech, that might have had the poor merit of not anticipating the use of playing cards in Europe, by about a century and a half. We are not aware of any other passage in this play which has afforded the learned' an opportunity (which they have not lost in speaking of these passages) of propounding the necessity of constructing a work of art upon the same principles of exactness that go to produce a perfect chronological table."-KNIGHT.

"Farewell, CHATILLON"-Spelled Chatillion in the folio, and so Anglicised for the sake of the verse elsewhere, as in the first line of the play.

"the MANAGE"-i. e. The conduct. Shakespeare uses it also in RICHARD II., and in the TEMPEST. So too in the old "King John," which preceded this play :Till I had. with an unresisted shock,

Control'd the manage of proud Angiers' walls.

- ROBERT FAULCONBRIDGE, and PHILIP, his bastard brother"-Shakespeare, in adopting the character of Philip Faulconbridge from the old play, proceeded on the following slight hint :

Next them a bastard of the king's deceas'd,

A hardie wild-head, rough and venturous. The character is compounded of two distinct person ages. "Sub illius temporis curriculo Falcasius de Brenle, Neusteriensis, et spurius ex parte matris, atque Bastardus, qui in vili jumento manticato ad Regis paulo ante clientelam descenderat."-(MATHEW PARIS.) Hollingshed says that "Richard I. had a natural son named Philip, who, in the year following, killed the Viscount de Limoges, to revenge the death of his father." Perhaps the name of Faulconbridge was suggested by the following passage in the continuation of Harding's "Chronicle," (1543:)-" One Faulconbridge, th' erle of Kent his bastarde, a stoute-hearted man."-MALONE and STEVENS.

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And here my mother stands to prove him so ;(i. e. not the legitimate son of Sir Robert Faulconbridge.) The mother affects to be very indignant at the accusation.

"But WHE'R I be as true begot"-Printed " But where I be," etc., in the folios; and where is often used in this sense, by old poets, when the metre required but a single syllable. So in act ii. scene 1, of this play :

Now shame upon you, whe'r she does, etc.

-a TRICK of Caur-de-lion's face"-" Trick," here and elsewhere in SHAKESPEARE, means peculiarity. Gloster remembers the "trick" of Lear's voice. Helen, thinking of Bertram, speaks

Of every line and trick of his sweet favour. Falstaff notes the "villainous trick" of the prince's eye. In all these cases, "trick" seems to imply habitual manner. In this view it is not difficult to trace up the

expression to the same common source as "trick" in its ordinary acceptation; as, habitual manner, artificial habit, artifice, entanglement, (from tricare.) Wordsworth has the Shakespearian use of "trick" in the "Excursion," (book i.:)—

Her infant babe

Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,

And sigh'd among its playthings. "that half-face"-This is a correction by Theobald, which appears just, the first folio giving "half that face."

"A HALF-FAC'D groat"-The "half-face" is the profile; and the allusion had probably become proverbial, for it occurs also in a play, the "Downfal of Robert Earl of Huntington," (1601)—

You half-fac'd groat, you thick-cheek'd chitty-face. The profile of the sovereign is given in one or two of our early coins; but Henry VII. was the first king who made an extensive issue of coins with the half-face.

"Shall, then, my father's will be of no force,

To dispossess that child which is not his?" I do not find that any of the English commentators have explained the difficulty which this question must present to most readers; why the father's will, in favour of the younger, did not settle the title to the land, independently of the point of legitimacy or illegitimacy of the elder brother. The dramatist is, however, both legally and historically accurate. From the time of the Norman conquest, lands in England ceased to be devisable, as they had been under the Saxon law. This remained in force until the statute of wills, in 32 Henry VIII., authorising the devises of real estate, under some restrictions, afterwards reenacted and extended under Charles II. (See II. Blackstone's "Commentaries," 374-6.) One of the exceptions to this rule was in the county of Kent, which did not apply here, as the lands are described in Northamptonshire. I do not mention this as bearing on the question of Shakespeare's asserted legal studies, because it is taken from the old "King John," and it is probable it was founded on a traditional account of a true incident. This probability is confirmed by another agreement with the history of the common law, not likely to have been invented. The Aula Regis of the first Norman kings was the highest court, followed the person of the king, was composed of his officers of state, sitting in his hall wherever he was, and in theory, and sometimes in fact, held by the king in person. This was changed, by Magna Charta, to a stationary court, at Westminster Hall, with regular judges. Thus King John, in the early part of his reign, was the last sovereign who could thus have had "a controversy come from the country to be judged by him." A few years later it would have come before the Common Pleas, at Westminster Hall.

"Lord of thy presence"-i. e. Great, and entitled to the respect due to his rank, in his own person, though without estate. King John, in act ii. scene 2, says of himself

Lord of our presence, Angiers, and of thee.

"Look, where three-farthings goes"-The three-farthing silver piece of Elizabeth was, as the value may import, extremely thin;-and thus the allusion of Faulconbridge, "my face so thin." "It was once the fashion," says Burton, ( Anatomy of Melancholy,") "to stick real flowers in the ear;" and thus the thin face and the rose in the ear, taken together, were to be avoided

Lest men should say, Look, where three-farthings goes;for the three-farthing piece was not only thin, and therefore might be associated with the "thin face," but it bore a rose, which assimilated with the rose in the ear. This coin was called the "three-farthing rose."

"Arise Sir Richard, and Plantagenet." Shakespeare, with poetical propriety, confers upon the Bastard the surname by which the royal house of Anjou was popularly known. Plantagenet" was not

the family name of that house, though it had been bestowed upon an ancestor of John from the broom in his bonnet-the Planta genista.

"Something about, a little from the right," etc.

"This speech, composed of allusive and proverbial sentences, is obscure. I am (says the sprightly knight) your grandson-a little irregularly, but every man cannot get what he wishes the legal way. He that dares not go about his designs by day, must make his motions in the night; he, to whom the door is shut, must climb the window, or leap the hatch. This, however, shall not depress me; for the world never inquires how any man got what he is known to possess, but al lows that to have is to have, however it was caught; and that he who wins, shot well, whatever was his skill, whether the arrow fell near the mark, or far off it."— JOHNSON.

"-thou wast got the way of honesty"—Alluding to the proverb, that "bastards are born lucky." Philip wishes his brother good fortune, because Robert was not a bastard: had he been illegitimate, the wish, according to the proverb, would have been needless.

"Good DEN"-An abbreviation of "good even," or evening; but sometimes used for "good day."

"For your CONVERSION"-This is the reading of the folio, but was altered, by Pope, to conversing. The Bastard, whose "new-made honour" is a "conversion" a change of condition-would say that to remember men's names (opposed, by implication, to forget) is too respective, (punctilious, discriminating,) and too sociable, for one of his newly attained rank.

"He and his tooth-pick"-One of the characteristics of the "picked man of countries" was the use of a toothpick; while the Englishman, who adhered to his own customs, would "suck" his teeth. It is unnecessary to cite passages to show that the toothpick was considered a foreign frivolity. Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Overbury, and Shirley, have each allusions to the practice.

"PICKED man of countries"-The "travelled fool," the "pert, conceited, talking spark," of the modern fable, is the old "picked man of countries." To" pick" is the same as to trim. Stevens says it is a metaphor derived from the action of birds in picking their feathers. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected," occurs in LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

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·Basilisco-like"-"Basilisco" is a cowardly brag gart in the old play of "Soliman and Perseda," (1599,) who claims to be a knight. The piece must have been popular, and has been attributed to Thomas Kyd, the author of the "Spanish Tragedy." "Soliman and Perseda" was anterior to KING JOHN, and in it we meet with just the same substitution of "knave" for "knight," in a passage which Theobald pointed out:

Basilisco. I, the aforesaid Basilisco, knight; good fellow, knight Piston. Knave, good fellow, knave.