to sustain and elevate the action to the end? Was his tragedy to be a mere dance of Fantoccini ? No, no. The remembrance of Constance can never be separated from the after-scenes in which Arthur appears; and at the very last, when the poison has done its work upon the guilty king, we can scarcely help believing that the spirit of Constance hovers over him, and that the echo of the mother's cries is even more insupportable than the "burn'd bosom" and the "parched lips," which neither his kingdom's rivers" nor the "bleak winds" of the north can "comfort with cold."

Up to the concluding scene of the third Act we have not learnt from Shakspere to hate John. We may think him an usurper. Our best sympathies may be with Arthur and his mother. But he is bold and confident, and some remnant of the indomitable spirit of the Plantagenets gives him a lofty and gallant bearing. We are not even sure, from the first, that he had not something of justice in his quarrel, even though his mother confidentially repudiates "his right." In the scene with Pandulph we completely go with him. We have yet to know that he would one day crouch at the feet of the power that he now defies; and he has therefore all our voices when he tells the wily and sophistical cardinal,

"That no Italian priest

Shall tithe or toll in our dominions."

But the expression of one thought that had long been lurking in the breast of John, sweeps away every feeling but that of hatred, and worse than hatred; and we see nothing, hereafter, in the king, but the creeping, cowardly assassin, prompting the deed which he is afraid almost to name to himself, with the lowest flattery of his instrument, and shewing us, as it were, the sting which wounds, and the slaver which pollutes, of the venomous and loathsome reptile. The

"Come hither, Hubert. O, my gentle Hubert,
We owe thee much"-

the

"By heaven, Hubert, I am almost asham'd
To say what good respect I have of thee "—

make our flesh creep. The warrior and the king vanish. If Shakspere had not exercised his consummate art in making John move thus stealthily to his purpose of blood-if he had made the suggestion of Arthur's death what John afterwards pretended it was "the winking of authority "the "humour"

"Of dangercus majesty, when, perchance, it frowns,"

we might have seen him hemmed in with revolted subjects and foreign invaders, with something like compassion. But this exhibition of low craft and desperate violence we can never forgive.

At the end of the third Act, when Pandulph instigates the Dauphin to the invasion of England, the poet overleaps the historical succession of events by many years, and makes the expected death of Arthur the motive of policy for the invasion.

"The hearts

Of all his people shall revolt from him,
And kiss the lips of unacquainted change;
And pick strong matter of revolt, and wrath,
Out of the bloody fingers' ends of John."

Here is the link which holds together the dramatic action still entire; and it wonderfully binds up all the succeeding events of the play.

In the fourth Act the poet has put forth all his power of the pathetic in the same ultimate direction as in the grief of Constance. The theme is not now the affection of a mother driven to frenzy by the circumstances of treacherous friends and victorious foes; but it is the irresistible power of the very helplessness of her orphan boy, triumphing in its truth and artlessness over the evil nature of the man whom John had selected to destroy his victim, as one

"Fit for bloody villainy,

Apt, liable, to be employed in danger."

It would be worse than idle to attempt any lengthened comment on that most beautiful scene between Arthur and Hubert, which carries on the main action of this play. Hazlitt has truly said, "if anything ever was penned, heart-piercing, mixing the extremes of terror and pity, of that which shocks

and that which soothes the mind, it is this scene.' When Hubert gives up his purpose, we do not the

less feel that

"The bloody fingers' ends of John'

have not been washed of their taint :

"Your uncle must not know but you are dead,"

tells us, at once, that no relenting of John's purpose had prompted the compassion of Hubert. Pleased, therefore, are we to see the retribution beginning. The murmurs of the peers at the once again crown'd,"-the lectures which Pembroke and Salisbury read to their sovereign,— -are but the preludes to the demand for "the enfranchisement of Arthur." Then comes the dissembling of John,

"We cannot hold mortality s strong hand,"

and the bitter sarcasms of Salisbury and Pembroke :

"Indeed we fear'd his sickness was past cure.
Indeed we heard how near his death he was,
Before the child himself felt he was sick."

"This must be answer'd" is as a knell in John's ears. Throughout this scene the king is prostrate before his nobles;-it is the prostration of guilt without the energy which too often accompanies it. Contrast the scene with the unconquerable intellectual. activity of Richard III., who never winces at reproach, seeing only the success of his crimes and not the crimes themselves,- -as for example, his answer in the scene where his mother and the widow of Edward upbraid him with his murders,—

"A flourish, trumpets! strike alarums, drums!

Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women
Rail on the Lord's anointed."

The messenger appears from France :---the mother of John is dead ;-"Constance in a frenzy died;" the "powers of France" have arrived "under the Dauphin." Superstition is brought in to terrify still more the weak king, who is already terrified with "subject enemies" and "adverse foreigners." The "prophet of Pomfret" and the "five moons affright him as much as the consequences of "young Arthur's death." He turns upon Hubert in the extremity of his fears, and attempts to put upon his instrument all the guilt of that deed. Never was a more striking display of the equivocations of conscience in a weak and guilty mind. Shakspere is here the true interpreter of the secret excuses of many a criminal, who would shift upon accessories the responsibility of the deviser of a wicked act, and make the attendant circumstances more powerful for evil than the internal suggestions. When the truth is avowed by Hubert, John does not rejoice that he has been spared the perpetration of a crime, but he is prompt enough to avail himself of his altered position :

"O haste thee to the peers."

Again he crawls before Hubert. But the storm rolls on.

The catastrophe of Arthur's death follows instantly upon the rejoicing of him who exclaimed, "Doth Arthur live?" in the hope to find a safety in his preservation upon the same selfish principle upon which he had formerly sought a security in his destruction. In a few simple lines we have the sad dramatic story of Arthur's end :

"The wall is high; and yet will I leap down :—
Good ground, be pitiful, and hurt me not!-
There's few, or none, do know me; if they did,
This ship-boy's semblance hath disguis'd me quite.
I am afraid; and yet I'll venture it."

How marvellously does Shakspere subject all his characters and situations to the empire of common sense! The Arthur of the old play, after receiving his mortal hurt, makes a long oration about his mother. The great dramatist carries on the now prevailing feeling of the audience by one pointed line:

"O me! my uncle's spirit is in these stones."

If any other recollection were wanting, these simple words would make us feel, that John was at surely the murderer of Arthur, when the terrors of the boy drove him to an inconsiderate attempt

to escape from his prison, as if the assassin, as some have represented, rode with him in the dim twilight by the side of a cliff that overhung the sea, and suddenly hurled the victim from his horse into the engulphing wave ;--or as if the king tempted him to descend from his prison at Rouen at the midnight hour, and, instead of giving him freedom, stifled his prayers for pity in the waters of the Seine. It is thus that we know the anger of "the distempered lords" is a just anger, when, finding Arthur's body, they kneel before that "ruin of sweet life," and vow to it the "worship of revenge." The short scene between Salisbury, Pembroke, the Bastard, and Hubert, which immediately succeeds, is as spirited and characteristic as anything in the play. Here we see "the invincible knights of old," in their most elevated character-fiery, implacable, arrogant, but still drawing their swords in the cause of right, when that cause was intelligible and undoubted. The character of Faulconbridge here rises far above what we might have expected from the animal courage, and the exuberant spirits of the Faulconbridge of the former Acts. The courage is indeed here, beyond all doubt :

"Thou wert better gall the devil, Salisbury

If thou but frown on me, or stir thy foot,

Or teach thy hasty spleen to do me shame,
I'll strike thee dead."

But we were scarcely prepared for the rush of tenderness and humanity that accompany the courage, as in the speech to Hubert :

'If thou didst but consent

To this most cruel act, do but despair,

And, if thou want'st a cord, the smallest thread

That ever spider twisted from her womb

Will serve to strangle thee; a rush will be

A beam to hang thee on; or wouldst thou drown thyself,

Put but a little water in a spoon,

And it shall be, as all the ocean,
Enough to stifle such a villain up."

It is this instinctive justice in Faulconbridge,--this readiness to uplift the strong hand in what he thinks a just quarrel,-this abandonment of consequences in the expression of his opinions,—that commands our sympathies for him whenever he appears upon the scene. The motives upon which he acts are entirely the antagonist motives by which John is moved. We have, indeed, in- Shakspere none of the essay-writing contrasts of smaller authors. We have no asserters of adverse principles made to play at see-saw, with reverence be it spoken, like the Moloch and Belial of Milton. But, after some reflection upon what we have read, we feel that he who leapt into Cœur de Lion's throne, and he who hath "a trick of Cœur de Lion's face," are as opposite as if they were the formal personifications of subtlety and candour, cowardice and courage, cruelty and kindliness. The fox and the lion are not more strongly contrasted than John and Faulconbridge; and the poet did not make the contrast by accident. And yet with what incomparable management are John and the Bastard held together as allies throughout these scenes. In the onset the Bastard receives honour from the hands of John,and he is grateful. In the conclusion he sees his old patron, weak indeed and guilty, but surrounded with enemies,-and he will not be faithless. When John quails before the power of a spiritual tyrant, the Bastard stands by him in the place of a higher and a better nature. He knows the dangers that surround his king :

"All Kent bath yielded; nothing there holds out
But Dover Castle; London hath receiv'd,
Like a kind host, the Dauphin and his powers
Your nobles will not hear you, but are gone
To offer service to your enemy."

But no dangers can daunt his resolution :

"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, and put on
The dauntless spirit of resolution."

The very necessity for these stirring words would shew us that from henceforth John is but a puppet without a will. The blight of Arthur's death is upon him; and he moves on to his own destiny, whilst Faulconbridge defies or fights with his enemies; and his revolted lords, even while they swear "A voluntary zeal, and unurg'a faith"

to the invader, bewail their revolt, and lament

"That, for the health and physic of our right,

We cannot deal but with the very hand

Of stern injustice and confused wrong."

But the great retribution still moves onward. The cause of England is triumphant; "the lords are all come back ;"-but the king is "poisoned by a monk:"

"Poison'd,-ill fare;-dead, forsook, cast off:
And none of you will bid the winter come,
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw;

Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course
Through my burn'd bosom; nor entreat the north
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips,

And comfort me with cold: -I do not ask you much,

I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait

And so ingrateful, you deny me that."

The interval of fourteen years between the death of Arthur and the death of John is annihilated. Causes and consequences, separated in the proper history by long digressions and tedious episodes, are brought together. The attributed murder of Arthur lost John all the inheritances of the house of Anjou, and allowed the house of Capet to triumph in his overthrow. Out of this grew a larger ambition, and England was invaded. The death of Arthur and the events which marked the last days of John were separated in their cause and effect by time only, over which the poet leaps. It is said that a man who was on the point of drowning, saw, in an instant, all the events of his life in connexion with his approaching end. So sees the poet. It is his to bring the beginnings and the ends of events into that real union and dependance which even the philosophical historian may overlook in tracing their course. It is the poet's office to preserve a unity of action; it is the historian's to shew a consistency of progress. In the chroniclers we have manifold changes of fortune in the life of John after Arthur of Britanny has fallen. In Shakspere Arthur of Britanny is at once revenged. The heart-broken mother and her boy are not the only sufferers from double courses. The spirit of Constance is appeased by the fall of John. The Niobe of a Gothic age, who vainly sought to shield her child from as stern a destiny as that with which Apollo and Artemis pursued the daughter of Tantalus, may rest in peace!