ians were still in the future. As for the multitude, they are, as Falstaff calls them, "food for powder" in the quarrels of their superiors.

So supreme was the position of the king that he to whom it was vouchsafed was supposed to have been destined for it by the special appointment of Heaven, and it was sacrilege to remove him :

Not all the water in the rough-rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.

But, although this was the accepted theory, which was of course firmly held by those to whom, in the distribution of fortune, had fallen this incomparable lot, yet the divinity that doth hedge a king did not prevent those who were not born to the position from aiming at it. The Histories are full of the attempts of princes to dethrone the Lord's anointed. King John usurped the seat which belonged by right to Arthur; King Henry the Fourth reigned through the deposition of Richard Second; Richard Third had to cut ever so many rivals out of the way before he reached the throne. These ambitions are the springs on which the history moves.

Shakspeare discusses every aspect of the regal position; and out of these plays there might easily be culled a book of maxims for those in authority:

A sceptre snatched with an unruly hand
Must be as boisterously maintained as gained,
And he that stands upon a slippery place
Makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up.

Let not the world see fear and sad distrust
Govern the motion of a kingly eye.

Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;
Threaten the threatener; and outface the brow
Of bragging horror. So shall inferior eyes,
That borrow their behaviours from the great,
Grow great by your example.

Treason is but trusted like the fox,

Who, ne'er so tame, so cherished and locked up, Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.

When King John, aware of the unsoundness of his own title, resolved to be crowned a second time, a wise councillor said:

To be possessed with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

To seek the beautous eye of heaven to garnish
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

When a king is asked whence he has obtained his

commission to fight in the quarrel of one who is being wronged, he answers nobly:

From that supernal Judge that stirs good thoughts In any breast of high authority

To look into the blots and stains of right.

Those, however, who, whether by inheritance or by force, attained the coveted possession of the crown found that it was not all of velvet. It brought with it a thousand duties which, if performed, wore out the life prematurely and, being neglected, involved the land in confusion. Says a king :

O God, methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain:
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run;
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest,
So many hours must I contemplate,
So many hours must I sport myself;

So many days my ewes have been with young,
So
fools will yean,
weeks ere the
many
poor
So many months ere I shall shear the fleece;
So minutes, hours, days, months and years,
Passed over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs into a quiet grave.

Ah what a life were this! how sweet, how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade

To shepherds looking on their silly sheep
Than doth a rich-embroidered canopy

To kings that fear their subjects' treachery?
And, to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds,
His cold, thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade-
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys-
Is far beyond a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,

When care, mistrust and treason wait on him.

And another far more strenuous king, worn out with labour and ceremony, thus apostrophizes sleep:

O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,

Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,

And hushed with buzzing nightflies to thy slumber,

Than in the perfumed chambers of the great

Under the canopies of costly state,

And lulled with sounds of sweetest melody?

Wilt thou, upon the high and giddy mast,
Seal up the shipboy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude, imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude
And, in the calmest and most stillest night,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low-lie-down,
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

The knightliest figure in Shakspeare is a deposed king. Richard the Second is the prey of favourites, wastes his substance and neglects his duties, till a rival, the shrewd and splendid Bolingbroke, profiting by his neglect, thrusts him from his seat. But, in the hour of humiliation, all the king awakens in Richard—not, indeed, the royal courage to reassert his claims, but the full sense of the dignity which he has lost, of the opportunities which he has thrown away, and of the God whom he has offended. He bends patiently beneath his heavy fate, as the storm of misfortune breaks over him; yet, as he goes to his doom, it is with steps more kingly than he has ever walked with before; and none of Shakspeare's kings in their glory affect us as does this one, when, almost mad with grief, he cries: