It is however Hotspur who is the ideal of youth to Bolingbroke and his feudal generation :

Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride:
O that it could be proved

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine Percy, his Plantagenet!

Yet viewed from any other standpoint than that of feudalism Hot-
spur appears to be only a fighting animal, with riotous eloquence
to mouth his riotous thoughts. When he rouses his mighty spirit
against the King, it is his own fellow-conspirators who speak of
him as
"drunk with choler," in a "mad heat" pouring forth" a
world of figures"; to use his own words, he is "whipp'd and
scourged with rods, nettled and stung with pismires" at merely
hearing of " this vile politician, Bolingbroke." Careless as to pos-
session, he will nevertheless "cavil on the ninth part of a hair,"
if it be a question of bargaining. He can respect no type of life
but his own: he risks the alliance which is the only hope of his
cause in order to mock in Glendower a different tone of grandi-
osity from his own fire-eating; the ballad which is charming all
other ears is to Hotspur no better than the mewing of a cat; it
seems to offend his Englishship that a Welshman should talk
Welsh. When one after another of the concerted movements
fails at the rendezvous Hotspur speaks as if this were encourag-
ing, so great is his itch to fight; it is his own comrades who de-
nounce the imaginative madness which has brought the cause to
its ruin. Such mere battle passion seems as irresponsible a thing
as Henry's gayeties; it is noteworthy that Percy's word as the sword
of his conqueror pierces him is this

4

O, Harry, thou hast robb'd me of my youth.5

1 I Henry the Fourth: I. iii, whole scene. 2 I Henry the Fourth: III. i. 140. 41 Henry the Fourth: IV. i. 76-83, 1. iii. 26-33.

8 I Henry the Fourth: III. i, whole scene. and whole scene; II Henry the Fourth: 5 I Henry the Fourth: V. iv. 77.

Both the rivals use the much abused word 'honour.'

Hotspur. By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,

To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks.

At the climax of his career Percy expresses his conception of such honour :

An if we live, we live to tread on kings;

If die, brave death, when princes die with us!1

There comes a situation when the other Henry exclaims:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,

I am the most offending soul alive.

The honour he is coveting is the post of cruel danger:

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honour.2

How do the two Harries appear when the course of events brings them across one another's path? They tell Hotspur of the prince in arms against his cause: he pours contempt upon the "swordand-buckler Prince of Wales," and, but that the King loves him not, he would have him poisoned with a pot of ale. Prince Henry's generous praise of his rival is reported: Hotspur is unmoved, and can only conceive of the advancing general as a wild libertine. Meanwhile the King has extolled Hotspur to his son, and the easy prince at last takes fire.

Percy is but my factor, good my lord,

To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf;

1 I Henry the Fourth: I. iii. 201; V. ii. 86.

2 Henry the Fifth: IV. iii. 20, 28.

8 I Henry the Fourth: IV. i, from 94; V. ii, from 46.

And I will call him to so strict account,
That he shall render every glory up,

Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

Henry plunges into the war, moves straight to his rival, redeems his boast to the letter; and then makes so little of achievement that he laughs while Falstaff appropriates the deed to himself.1

Or there is in the Dauphin another example of correct young manhood. Like Hotspur, the Dauphin cannot conceive of any type of life different from his own; what has not been drawn to its model must needs be "a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth"; his seniors in vain seek to convince him by facts.2 It is clear that the French prince has never known youth as a period of freedom and moral choice; his life has merely been passing through stages of development of the feudal warrior. What idealising power he possesses runs to the glorification of his horse.

Ca, ha! he bounds from the earth as if his entrails were
hairs. he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches
it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe
of Hermes. . . . He is pure air and fire; and the dull ele-
ments of earth and water never appear in him, but only in
patient stillness while his rider mounts him.
The man

hath no wit that cannot, from the rising of the lark to the lodg-
ing of the lamb, vary deserved praise on my palfrey: it is a
theme as fluent as the sea: turn the sands into eloquent
tongues, and my horse is argument for them all.

Yet, when the chivalrous magnificence of this prince is pricked by the point of close observation, it seems to collapse into a somewhat dubious courage, and this on the testimony of military comrades.

11 Henry the Fourth: III. ii. 147; V. iv. 161, and whole scene.
2 Henry the Fifth: II. iv. 30.

I think he will eat all he kills.

Constable.
Orleans. By the white hand of my lady, he's a gallant prince.
Constable. Swear by her foot, that she may tread out the oath.
Orleans. He is simply the most active gentleman in France.
Constable. Doing is activity; and he will still be doing.

Orleans. He never did any harm, that I heard of.

Constable. Nor will do none to-morrow: he will keep that good name still.

Orleans. I know him to be valiant.

Constable. I was told that by one that knows him better than you. Orleans.

What's he?

Constable. Marry, he told me so himself; and he said he cared not who knew it.1

These are the types of the old nobility with which Henry's youth refused to be in tune. It is abundantly evident that all these have taken up the strenuous life simply by reason of their limitations; this was all that they had in them to do. When the call comes Henry proves the most strenuous of them all: he keeps his warlike father from a faint-hearted retreat, and is as easily superior to his military comrades as he has been to Falstaff and Poins. But Henry has the larger nature, in which action is balanced by repose, accepted ideals can reinforce themselves by curiosity and fresh interest in the raw material of human nature. To the successive generations of men youth ever comes as the period of exploration, the wanderjahre during which new ingredients may be absorbed for crystallisation into a richer compound; nature's great barrier against a specialisation which would settle into hereditary caste. In this sense Henry's is a natural youth. But to say this is of course not to justify all that the prince does in his adventurous nonage. The master temptation of the young is the desire to see life for themselves; like the hero of Ecclesiastes, they will plunge into folly carrying their wisdom with them. Henry himself does not come scathless through the ordeal; on his own principles the attack upon the Chief Justice is an outrage,

1 Henry the Fifth: III. vii, whole scene.

21 Henry the Fourth: V. iv.

an outrage atoned for at the moment by submission, and afterwards by the promotion of his rebuker. But the 'wildness' of the prince has been a symptom of moral vigour, and its issue has been moral enrichment. Not for a moment has Henry been under any spell of deception; he has humorously recognised that he must suppress deeper feelings which the best of his associates were incapable of understanding. There is thus no miracle in the ease with which he drops them. Being awaked, I do despise my dream.2

But men are known by their dreams. When the new type of king is on the throne it is found that his father's enemies "have steeped their galls in honey"; the wide human sympathies of Henry have established his throne upon the broad basis of a people's love.

The play of Henry the Fifth presents the moral hero in the new life of responsibility. It is the same breadth and balance of human nature that is the fundamental impression. The fate of history makes the reign a single achievement of war. But with Henry action must be balanced by council. What the first act presents is a total contrast to all that the dying advice of Bolingbroke had forecast; it is bishops and aged statesmen who are urging on war, the King "in the very May-morn of his youth who is holding back with moral scruples and far-reaching policy. The moral question is one of "the law of nature and of nations," as the world then understood them, and the learned Canterbury is the legal adviser who must expound. But Henry makes the most solemn of appeals for a disinterested judgment.

And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,

That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,

Or nicely charge your understanding soul

With opening titles miscreate, whose right

1 II Henry the Fourth: II. ii. 35-74.

2 II Henry the Fourth: V. v. 55.

8 Henry the Fifth: II. ii. 30.