This fortress built by nature for herself, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, The character of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV, is drawn with a masterly hand-patient for occasion, and then steadily availing himself of it, seeing his advantage afar off, but only seizing on it when he has it within his reach; humble, crafty, bold, and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees, building power on opinion, and cementing opinion by power. His disposition is first unfolded by Richard himself, who however is too self-willed and secure to make a proper use of his know ledge. "Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green, What reverence he did throw away on slaves; As 'twere to banish their affects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench; With-thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends; And he our subjects' next degree in hope." Afterwards, he gives his own character to Percy, in these words: "I thank thee, gentle Percy, and be sure It shall be still thy true love's recompense." We know how he afterwards kept his promise. His bold assertion of his own rights, his pretended submission to the king, and the ascendency which he tacitly assumes over him without openly claiming it, as soon as he has him in his power, are characteristic traits of this ambitious and politic usurper. But the part of Richard himself gives the chief interest to the play. His folly, his vices, his misfortunes, his reluctance to part with the crown, his fear to keep it, his weak and womanish regrets, his starting tears, his fits of hectic passion, his smothered majesty, pass in succession before us, and make a picture as natural as it is affecting. Among the most striking touches of pathos are his wish, "O that I were a mockery king of snow, to melt before the sun of Bolingbroke," and the incident of the poor groom who comes to visit him in prison, and tells him how "it yearned his heart that Bolingbroke upon his coronation-day rode on Roan Barbary." We shall have occasion to return hereafter to the character of Richard II in speaking of Henry VI. There is only one passage more, the description of his entrance into London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote here, if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by rote, so praised and painted—but its beauty surmounts all these considerations. "Duchess. My lord, you told me you would tell the rest, When weeping made you break the story off Of our two cousins coming into London. York. Where did I leave? Duchess. At that sad stop, my lord, Where rude misgovern'd hands, from window tops, Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know,— Duchess. Alas, poor Richard! where rides he the while? After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes But dust was thrown upon his sacred head! That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd HENRY IV. IN TWO PARTS. IF Shakspeare's fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to faults in his tragedies (which was not often the case) he has made us amends by the character of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most substantial comic character that ever was invented. Sir John carries a most portly presence in the mind's eye; and in him, not to speak it profanely, 66 we behold the fulness of the spirit of wit and humour bodily." We are as well acquainted with his person as his mind, and his jokes come upon us with double force and relish from the quantity of flesh through which they make their way, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or "lards the lean earth as he walks along." Other comic characters seem, if we approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air, "into thin air;" but this is embodied and palpable to the grossest |