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female grace and loveliness as Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

This

While, however, drawing these somewhat weird pictures of women, Shakspeare, in the English Histories has painted his completest portrait of a man. is the Prince Hal of the two parts of Henry the Fourth and the King Henry the Fifth of the drama which follows. In some respects this is the most perfect creation of Shakspeare's genius. Having three plays through which to develop the character, he builds it up slowly, exhibiting it fully in every phase; and he is obviously working with pleasure from beginning to end. In completing his portrait of Brutus in Julius Cæsar he says, through the mouth of one of the interlocutors:

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, This'was a man;

but, fine as the figure of Brutus is, this characterization is far truer of Prince Henry. If anyone wishes to know Shakspeare's conception of a man, here it is.

Tradition said that Henry the Fifth, after a wild and reckless youth, was sobered by having to assume the responsibility of the crown and thereafter ruled as an able and virtuous king. Following this suggestion, Shakspeare brings the Prince of Wales into contact

with loose and wild companions and, side by side with the dazzling world of the court and the camp, unveils a world of rascaldom, whose population consists of the dregs of the army floated home from the French wars, with women to match. These gentlemen are soldiers by profession, but, being out of employment, they are really adventurers of the lowest type, lodging in taverns and picking up a living in any way they can, not even disdaining purse-snatching or highway-robbery at a pinch.

Those who wish Shakspeare always to write as a philosopher have been exercised about the meaning of these scenes of low life, introduced in such violent contrast with the dignity of history; and they say that the intention is to caricature the real history. Up above, there is the world of royalty and chivalry, with its pomp and ceremony, where everyone is clothed in the glittering robes of dignity and everything is expressed in lofty language; but the dramatist, drawing a broad line beneath this picture, then, below this level of respectability, paints the picture of another world, where the clothing is, so to speak, taken off, men are seen as they really are, and everything is called by its plain name. The highway-robbery of these cutpurses, he means to say, is just the soldiering of the warriors of the great world with the gilt taken off; their coarse carnivals are the counterpart of the banquets and pageants of the upper world, only with

the ceremony laid aside and the human passions acknowledged. Their bullying and rhodomontade, though they disgust with their coarseness, contain in reality the same sentiments as the speeches of the champions of the tournay and the battlefield, whose words charm us with their eloquence. In this view there may be some truth, because many of the things done in these Histories in the name of chivalry and statesmanship are at heart grossly immoral; and, while lending to royalty and war the disguise of a splendid language, Shakspeare betrays here and there his sense that a great deal of the dignity is bunkum, No doubt he means also that the charm to Prince Hal, when he escaped from the court and the camp and joined his low associates, was to see human nature and human life as they really are, divested of the masks and cloaks of ceremony. But the poet's chief motive probably was the mere fun of the thing: he knew that his auditors wished to be amused; and, having struck upon this world of low life and found it entertaining, he pursued his discovery, and in one or two plays made it rather the picture, to which the real history serves as a frame, than the frame to the picture. Some of the scenes descend very low indeed; and young readers need to be warned not to linger on them, lest they be defiled.

Of this subterranean world of rascaldom the king is Sir John Falstaff, and he holds his court at the

tavern of Mrs. Quickly in Eastcheap. Falstaff is the greatest of Shakspeare's comic characters-the greatest comic character in English literature-the progenitor of an innumerable succession of such, down to the Sam Wellers and Dick Swivellers of recent days.

He is a mountain of a man, though, he tells Hal, "When I was about thy years, I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief: it blows a man up like a bladder". He rules in the kingdom of the tavern; and its frequenters -the drinking, thieving, bragging ex-soldiers, the drawers and the women-worship him. His great distinction, however, is the observance of the Heirapparent, to whom he performs the office discharged by the fool of yore in the courts of kings. He serves as a whetstone for the Prince's wit: "I am not only witty in myself," he says, "but the cause that wit is in other men"; and he treasures up fun for the Prince's entertainment. Thus, when he is with Justice Shallow in the country, he says: "I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing-out of six fashions"; and he adds the shrewd remark: "Oh, it is much that a lie, with a slight oath, and a jest, with a sad brow, will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders".

He is a mighty swiller of liquor: "If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to

addict themselves to sack". He is a monstrous bragger: in the war he pretends to consider himself the pivot on which the whole action is turning: "There is not a dangerous action can peep out his head but I am thrust upon it. Well, I cannot last ever; but it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common": though in the battle he turns out an arrant coward and, when danger approaches, lies down and feigns himself dead. He is deeply afflicted with impecuniosity: "I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out; but the disease is incurable". When, as an officer, he is sent to raise soldiers for the war, he fills his pockets by allowing those drafted to pay for substitutes, till he says: "Such have I, to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you would think I had a hundred-and-fifty tattered prodigals lately come from swine-keeping. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me, I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarethere is but a shirt and a half in all my company. I'll not march through Coventry with them, that's flat." He tells prodigious lies; and Harry's diversion is to egg him on to further and further exaggerations. But Jack knows well enough the fun he is causing by thus drawing the longbow, and he enjoys as much as anyone the jokes at his own expense.

crows;

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