tered into the chamber, took away the crown, and departed. The father being suddenly revived out of that trance, quickly perceived the lack of his crown ; and, having knowledge that the Prince his son had taken it away, caused him to come before his presence, requiring of him what he meant so to misuse himself. The Prince, with a good audacity, answered, “Sir, to mine and all men's judgments you seemed dead in this world, wherefore, I, as your next heir-apparent, took that as mine own, and not as yours.' • Well, fair son,' said the King, with a great sigh,' what right I had to it, God knoweth.' Well,' said the Prince, 'if you die king, I will have the garland, and trust to keep it with the sword against all my enemies, as you have done.' Then,' said the King, ' I commit all to God, and remember you to do well.'

This passage in his favourite historian entirely justifies Shakspeare in framing a scene which, notwithstanding the objection of Dr. Johnson, I regard as striking and beautiful; though every speech in it contains, as I fear nearly every speech in Shakspeare contains, something that a delicate and correct critic would expunge or alter. Yet it is an excellent speech, in tone, in topics, and (with those exceptions) in language. I know not whether, in respect of this and other passages,t my ear deceives me, but to me

“ The sound does seem an echo to the sense.” I mean, that if the successive passages, different in their tendency, were read to a man ignorant of the English language, he would nevertheless distinguish them properly. In this speech, for instance, he would mark the transition from the solemn remonstrance of the King, and his speculative description of the wild and wanton England which the recklessness of his sucessor would exhibit. I may be wrong; but, waving this fancy, I beg you to insert a few passages.

“P. Henry. I never thought to hear you speak again."

“ K. Henry. Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought:
I stay too long by thee, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for my empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with mine honours
Before thy hour be ripe? O, foolish youth !
That seek'st the greatness that will overwhelm thee.
What! canst thou not forbear

an hour?
Then get thee gone; and dig my grave thyself;
And bid the merry bells ring to thine ear,
That thou art crown'd, not that I am dead.

me half

Pluck down my officers, break my decrees;
For now a time is come to mock at form.
Harry the Fifth is crown'd! Up, Vanity !
Down, Royal State! All you sage counsellors, hence !
Ard to the English court assemble now,
From every region, apes of idleness !
Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum ;
Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night; rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins the newest kinds of ways ?
Be happy, he shall trouble you no more!
* Hol. 57; Hall, 45.

+ See p. 473 of last number. Then follows a line-England shall double gild his treble guilt- which Warburton expunges as nonsene. Though I agree with Johnson that Shakspeare wrote

England shall give him office, honour, might;
For the fifth Harry from curb'd licence plucks
The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog

Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent."
Ther the Prince, in a serious strain-

“ P. Henry. O pardon me, my liege! but for my tears,
The moist impediments unto my speeeh,
I had forestall’d this dear and deep rebuke,
Ere you with grief had spoke, and I had heard
The course of it so far. There is your crown;
And He that wears the crown immortally,
Long guard it yours! If I affect it more
Than as your honour and as your renown,
Let me no more from this obedience rise
(Which my most true and inward-duteous spirit
Teacheth), this prostrate and exterior bending !
But if it did infect my blood with joy,
Or swell my thoughts to any strain of pride;
If any rebel or vain spirit of mine
Did, with the least affection of a welcome,
Give entertainment to the might of it,
Let heaven for ever keep it from my head !
And make me as the poorest vassal is,
That doth with awe and terror kneel to it!

“ K. Henry. O, my son!
Heaven put it in thy mind to take it hence,
That thou might'st win the more thy father's love,

Pleading so wisely in excuse of it."* I have no room for the rest, which, if not genuine, is consistent. In conclusion, the poet follows his authority.

“ How I came by the crown, O God, forgive !
And grant it may with thee in true peace live!

P. Henry. My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be;
Which I, with more than with a common pain,

'Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain." No one of the contemporary historians has this story of the crown. Elmham describes the death-bed of Henry with incidents entirely different. The Prince took the sacrament with his father, who blessed him after the manner of the patriarchs.f The oldest version of it is in the French chronicle of Monstrelet, who wrote within a few years of the event, though, if alive at the time, he was very young. Monstrelet prefaces his account with a remark which his English chroniclers neglect, and of which Tyler has not availed himself.

“ It was the custom in that country, whenever the king was ill, to place the royal crown on a cushion beside his bed, and for his successor to take it on his death."

dead, took the crown as a matter of course; and his reviving father did not so much reprove him for his precipitancy as remind him that he had no right to the crown, because the father himself had none. The story is told not as against the son, but as exhibiting the father's consciousness of his usurpation. The cause of Richard, whose infant wife was a daughter of France, was always popular in that country.

I am not aware that any such custom is mentioned by an English antiquary. The Frenchman may have drawn upon his imagination for the rest of the story as well as for this. But I admit the case to be one of those in which the story itself, and the invention of it without foundation, are both so improbable that there is only a choice of difficulties.

The King's mistake about the Jerusalem chamber is from Holinshed; who also mentions, but only as applicable to the last year of this reign, the notion of an expedition to the Holy Land.*

In the last number I referred to the King's discontent with the conduct of the Prince, and to the supposed supercession of young Henry in the council by his brother Thomas.t Henry was certainly not put out of the council at the time imagined by Shakspeare; but it is the opinion of his latest and most elaborate eulogist, Mr. Tyler, that he had ceased to be of the council some time before his father's death, and that there was some disagreement between the Prince and the King. The causes are not clearly developed.

Up to the year 1411 there is uninterrupted testimony to the favour in which Henry stood with his father and his council, and with the Parliament. From both the latter bodies he received thanks for his service on the Welsh boriler. I In 1409 and 1410 he was appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports and Captain of Dover Castle; and in these years he was of the privy council, and necessarily the first member of it. And his father, about the same time, granted to him a house at Coldharbour, Tear Eastcheap, in the city of London.

It was while he had all these honours, and this residence, that an affray took place between some citizens of London, and two of the king's sons, at supper, after midnight, in Eastcheap; and it is a remarkable fact, that of these, Henry was not one: the delinquents were the Princes Thomas and John, 1-that John of whom Falstaff says, “ this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh, but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine.” And after this occurrence, as well as before it, Henry still took part in the council.

In 1411 a part of the force under the Prince's command was sent to assist the Duke of Burgundy against the Duke of Orleans, and it has been inferred, from the dates, that out of this occurrence there grew a coolness between the King and the Prince. Hardyng, after mentioning the expedition in aid of Burgundy, writes

“ The King discharged the Prince from his council,

And set my lord Sir Thomas in his stead,
Chief of Council, for the King's more avail,
For which the Prince, of wrath and wilfulhood,
Again him made debate and frowardhood,

With whom the King took part and held the field,

To time the Prince unto the King did yield."* One contemporary writer says that the aid to Burgundy was sent with the king's approbation; but another tells us that the king afterwards favoured the rival faction; † and this is the period at which, according to both, some persons about the king endeavoured, not unsuccessfully, to set father and son at variance: and then comes the strange story, amplified by Holinshed, I from those older chroniclers, of Henry's visit to his father in company with his numerous friends, and his offer to sacrifice his own life.

The scene is said to have terminated in a reconciliation. Nevertheless, whatever might be the cause, the records show that the Prince of Wales did cease to attend the council. Tyler thinks that the king grew jealous of the popularity of his son ; l but it is clear that the dissolute habits of the prince were neither the cause (as Shakspeare intimates) nor the consequence (as Schlegel apprehends) of the king's estrangement, or the prince's absence from council. I

The fifth act introduces the younger Henry as king. There is, I think, some inconsistency in the unfavourable comparison which Warwick makes of Henry the Fifth with his three brothers.

“O that the living Harry bad the temper

Of him, the worst of these three gentlemen!
How many nobles then should hold their places,

That must strike sail to spirits of vile sort !” This is the very man whom we have twice noticed as taking the part of Prince Henry, and prophesying that he would cast off his companions of “ vile sort." But the new king soon satisfies them all.

“This is the English, not the Turkish court:

Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,

But Harry Harry." Malone has accounted for this reference to Turkish history. Amurath the Third died in 1596, about the time when this play was written. The people preferred Amurath, the younger son, to Mahomet the eldest; Mahomet invited all his brothers to a feast, and strangled them.**

We have already partly noticed the dialogue which now occurs between Henry and the Chief Justice.ft. The new king makes an amende completely honorable to the intrepid judge; he confirms him in his office, and invites him to take “ foremost hand” in the national councils.

All this is Shakspeare's own. Holinshed tells us only that “ he chose men of gravity, wit, and high policy, by whose wise council he

. P. 369. † See Elmham, p. 11; Otterburne, 270, 271; and Hardyng, 369; but this was after the dismissal from council.

See No. ccxii. 474. As to the dress, see Luden, 149. § Some time before February, 1412. Tyler i. 293-8. So Luden, 133

See in Tyler, i. 282, and ii. 1425, a refutation of a story, adopted by Turner, of the prince's attempt, in 1811, to usurp regal authority.

might at all times rule to his honour and dignity;"'* calling to mind, it is added, the stout behaviour of the Chief Justice in committing him.

But in the old chronicles there is no warrant even for this reminiscence; and the records show that within a few days of Henry's accession a new Chief Justice was appointed in the room of Gascoigne.f

David Hume, in his history, describes the Chief Justice as trembling to approach the royal presence.” The historian, I verily believe, had no authority but that of Shakspeare! It is not only boys, or uneducated soldiers, that learn English history from the great dramatist!

But the poet has the authority of older as well as of later chronicles for Henry's change of manners and conduct.

“I survive
To mock the expectations of the world;
To frustrate prophecies; and to raze out
Rotten opinion, which has writ me down
After my seeming. The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flow'd in vanity till now;
Nor doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea ;
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,

And flow henceforth in formal majesty.”
I have already said & that it is from the concurring testimony of his-
torians to this reformation, that the previous state of reprobation is
inferred.

“ He was suddenly changed into another man, regardsul of honesty, modesty, and gravity, endeavouring to practise every sort of virtue. His manners and conduct were an example to every class, as well of ecclesiastics as of laymen."'ll

One of the principal symptoms of amendment is, in the play, the banishment of Falstaff and the other companions of the prince. For this there can be no ancient authority, since there is none for the vile associates. But even the more recent authority, on which Shakspeare generally relies, fails him when he makes Henry severe and harsh towards the friends of his youth.

“ Whereas aforetime he had made himself a companion unto misruly mates of dissolute order and life, he now banished them all from his presence, but not unrewarded or else unpreferred, inhibiting them, upon a great pain, not once to approach, lodge, or sojourn within ten miles of his court or presence.”

And Stow's language is remarkable in illustration of what I have said of the rank and situation of Henry's associates.

“After his coronation he called unto him all those young tlemen that were the followers of his young acts, to every one of whom he gave rich and bounteous gifts, and then commanded that as muny as would change their manners, as he intended to do, should abide with him in his court; and to all that would persevere in their former light conversation he gave express commandment, upon pain of their heads, never after this day to come into luis presence.” * Hol., 61.

+ Tyler, i. 369.
When I wrote No. I. I had not seen Southey's avowal of this source of histo-
rical information. Lord Chatham is said to have made the same avowal.

ở P. 469.
| Wals., 382; and see Otterb., 273 ; Elmham, 16; Luden, 115,
HỊ P. 342

lords and gen