that pale, that white-faced shore

Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides And coops from other lands her islanders.

England, hedged-in with the main,

That water-walled bulwark, still secure

And confident from foreign purposes.

The most wonderful passage of this kind is in the dying utterances of John of Gaunt. The King, his nephew, has so mismanaged the revenues that they are all pawned and bonded to creditors, and he, as his uncle tells him, is "landlord of England, not its king." The dying noble is tortured with the shame of his country's condition, and breaks out thus:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;

This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England; This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home

For Christian service and true chivalry—
As is the sepulchre-in stubborn Jewry-
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son ;
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Is now leased out-I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, How happy then were my ensuing death.1 Passages like this must have roused enormous enthusiasm in the auditors who first heard them; and Shakspeare feeds their fervour by contrasting England and the English character with other nations. He is impatient of the tendency of his countrymen to copy foreign manners, such as

fashions in proud Italy,

Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.

Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity-
So it be new, there's no respect how vile-
That is not quickly buzzed into our ears?

A large portion of the action of the Histories is occupied with the French wars; and he is never weary of the contrast between French and English-French bragging and English valour, French volubility and English reserve, French polish and English down

1 For the sake of facility in reading, some lines have been left out. So also at pp. 22, 23, 24, 25, 33, 34, 35, 73, 90, 92, 93, 165, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 234, 239, 261, 267, 271.

rightness, French lightness and English weight. He says that a single pair of English legs could carry three French bodies. An English herald thus addresses the French army, which has landed in England:

That hand which had the strength, even at your door,

To cudgel you and make you take the hatch;
To dive, like buckets, in concealed wells;
To crouch in litter of your stable-planks;

To lie, like pawns, locked up in chests and trunks;
To hug with swine; to seek sweet safety out
In vaults and prisons; and to thrill and shake
Even at the crying of your nation's crow,
Thinking his voice an armed Englishman—
Shall that victorious hand be feebled here
That in your chambers gave you chastisement?
No: know, the gallant monarch is in arms,
And, like an eagle, o'er his aery towers,

To souse annoyance which comes near his nest.

The Welsh, Irish and Scotch characters are likewise contrasted with the English, of course to the advantage of the latter. The Welshman, all through Shakspeare's plays, is a favourite butt, with his odd way of pronouncing the English language, his pedantry and his self-esteem; and the fun was probably good at the time, though to us now it is rather heavy. Shakspeare does not make much of the Irishman: he left the

infinite possibilities of drollery lodged in Pat to be bagged by Thackeray. Nor is very much made of the Scot, though Sandy even then, in ways suitable to the times, had learned his trick of fattening his lantern jaws on the good things of the South:

There's a saying, very old and true,

"If that you will France win,

Then with Scotland first begin":

For, once the eagle England being in prey,

To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,

To tear and havoc more than she can eat.

As the representative of patriotism in the Histories may be taken Faulconbridge in the first of them. This is one of Shakspeare's most peculiar characters, and he appears to be a pure creation. When first he comes upon the scene, he seems intended for a comic character; and there is in him throughout an element of sarcastic criticism; he makes fun of the conventionalities of life and of the pomp and pretence of war, and not less does he turn his scorn against himself in a tone of raillery that recalls Thackeray; but, as the action proceeds, his character deepens; the peril of his country makes a hero of him; and the play closes with these rousing words of his :

This England never did, nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them; nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

ROYALTY.-Shakspeare is no demagogue; he has no idea even of the sovereignty of the people, of which everybody nowadays speaks with so much respect. To him the people was

The blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant, wavering multitude.

The

In the period of which he was writing in these Histories the most conspicuous and perfect form of human life was that of the king, and he paints it in all its opulence -in its dignities, prerogatives and functions. position that came nearest to it was perhaps that of the great ecclesiastic; and this also he has portrayed in the proud papal legate Pandulph and the extravagant Cardinal Wolsey. Next came the great nobles; and these also are described in their ambitions and services; but it is in the sunshine of the throne that they live, and they wither in its shadow. The middle class hardly appears in Shakspeare except as the hurrahing multitude on a day of triumph: its day and its histor