It is only when we thus note the place occupied by Henry V. among Shakspere's creations that the full meaning of his striking character of this king discloses itself. HENRY stands in the broadest contrast to the unhappy Richard, who is always unreal, capricious, and fantastically reflective, not without a certain 'controlling majesty' in his look, such as might naturally belong to a son of the Black Prince, but at first rapacious, violent, a scorner of those whose old age he should honour, and absurdly confident of success without doing anything to earn it, and then, when all his hopes have failed, unable to do more than fall pathetically, rather than with dignity, and to 'moralize' his own griefs under a thousand semipoetic images. Compare with this what HENRY THE FIFTH is made to be as Prince of Wales and as king. The legends of his riotous youth are assumed to be true; and, in order dramatically to enhance them, the part which he really bore in civil affairs during his father's lifetime is almost put aside. Yet the disorder, though audacious, is never foul, far less mean; unlike the 'rash fierce blaze of riot' for which the dying Gaunt vainly reproves the young Richard, it wins to HENRY the hearts of his people, as a whole, instead of alienating them; gives him the most inward and available acquaintance with their inclinations and thoughts, and enables him in time of need always to speak the one word required to carry them heartily along with him. On high principles of morality it is of course true, that 'convertites,' like the HENRY of the play, mostly cast away the vices of youth only to take instead of them those of middle life or old age; as, in point of fact, the unmeasured cruelty and selfishness of HENRY'S war in France were many times worse morally than the worst outrages attributed to his youth. But with what a light touch does Shakspere avoid this dramatic difficulty! How truly, as the real history shows, does he represent HENRY as guiding his conscience, as regards the war, by the advice of the 'grave

and learned divines' whom he had about him, and throwing his own responsibility on them, without a thought of its being wrong to do so; and, above all, with how true an instinct does he place him, as regards the main action of the play, in an attitude of defence rather than aggression, cheerily confident, not in himself, but in God's protection, even when the odds are strongest against him, escaping from the danger almost by a miracle (and yet by one which he has done his best to bring about), and as humble in the moment of victory as he had been when the danger was most fearful. We cannot help sympathizing, even with an aggressor, when self-defence has thus become his duty, and he discharges it with such simple-hearted manliness.

Shakspere often seems to feel a peculiar pleasure in comparing the spirit of firm and practical reflection with. that which wanders among vague imagery to no purpose; as when he contrasts the banished Duke's mode of thinking, in As You Like It, with that of Jaques, or makes Horatio criticise Hamlet's comparisons as 'too curious.'* We may therefore well consider that he had a purpose in bringing out so strongly, on the one hand, the unreal luxuriance of Richard's fancies, and, on the other, the deep and searching thought which HENRY carries on side by side with action. As regards the latter, there is hardly anything, even in Shakspere's latest tragedies, finer than HENRY's condemnation of LORD SCROOP, in ii. 2 (see the note on the place), as having thrown by his treason a blot of suspicion on even the purest and most acknowledged virtue; or the way in which he works out, in iv. I, the principle that "there is a soul of goodness in things evil," if men would only distil it out; especially when we remember that the same writer who can thus represent inward truth from the point

* See, in As You Like It, the note on ii. 1, 23; and Hamlet, Introduction, p. xiii.

of view of philosophy, as Goethe might have done in his time, is able, not only to be simply patriotic and popular (as Goethe could not) in the king's addresses to his soldiers, but to realize strongly, in iv. 1, 290, the kind of spiritual religion which holds that there must needs be something calling for repentance not only in our wrongdoings, but in the attempts which we make to atone for them.

Along with this play should be read, if possible, Sir Harris Nicolas' account of the battle of Agincourt, and the chapter on the subject in Michelet's History of France, which he takes chiefly from S. Rémy and the other authorities on the English side. To these may be added the biography of Archbishop Chichele in Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; with the remark, however, that resistance to the Pope is in the eyes of this writer so prevailing a merit, that he can hardly find fault with any one who is able to plead it; and seems to think it unnecessary to excuse either the Archbishop, for advising a frightful war with France in order to keep off possible confiscation of church property, or the King for so readily taking the advice, without really weighing the grounds which Chichele put forward. In addition to the passages from these writers given in the notes, we may refer, as peculiarly worthy of attention, to Sir H. Nicolas' account of the neutral state of neither war nor peace in which HENRY found the two countries at his accession--war having been, in fact, only suspended by an armistice which was to expire on January 1, 1415; to the hostility towards the House of Lancaster shown by France from the accession of HENRY IV.; to the bold declaration made by the Bishop of Bourges before HENRY, that not only had he no right to the kingdom of France, but that even in England he was a mere usurper of what belonged to EDWARD EARL OF MARCH; and to HENRY'S ungenerous taunt to the captive ORLEANS, that he had gained

the victory of Agincourt 'because God wished to punish the French, inasmuch as never was there greater sensuality, disorder, sin, and vice seen, than now prevail in France, which it is horrible to have described; and, if God is provoked, it is no subject of surprise, and no one can be astonished at it.' If such arguments were really used to ORLEANS, it is no wonder, first, that the French historian of our own time should ask 'whether it was so clear that England bore a commission to execute the divine judgments on the erring France'; and, secondly, that ORLEANS himself should beguile his twenty-five years' captivity in England by verses not complimentary to our nation; such as

"Peuple maudit, tar dis en Dieu créans,
Sera l' isle de tous points desolée.
Par leur orgueil vient la dure journée
Dont leur prophète Merlin

Pronostica leur doloreuse fin,

Quand il écript: Vie perdrez et terre.

Lors monstreront estrangiers et voisins;
‘Au temps jadis cy était l'Angleterre.'

A few words may be said here as to some attempts made in the notes to this edition towards reconstructing the text, which may seem to offend against the critical canon which forbids wholesale emendation. It is quite true, of course, that the old editions, bad as they are, are still all that we have to trust to; that all emendation should therefore have direct reference to what we find in one or other of these; and that, if we insert what we ourselves fancy to be right without such authority, we may be doing our best to make the text of Shakspere as irrecoverable as that of Sophocles would be, if treated as Mr. Blaydes or Mr. Burgess would handle it.

Keeping this canon in mind, we must still remember that some tolerably sweeping conjectural emendations have yet been universally welcomed; witness Collier's

change of 'murder or foulness' to 'or other foulness' in King Lear, i. 1, 226, and Hanmer's suggestion of 'ling, heath, broom, furze, any thing' for 'long heath, brown furze,' &c., in Tempest, i. I. Both these changes, and a host of others, justify themselves by the probability that the compositor in one of the early editions printed a word wrong, or words in a wrong order, or both, and that the fault escaped the corrector's notice. But it would appear that in other instances the error has deeper roots; inasmuch as not only were words printed wrong in the first proof, but the corrector, instead of leaving the fault unnoticed, made it worse by altering the rest of the passage instead of what was really wrong, so that the text of Shakspere in such places has suffered a kind of compound fracture. A few instances from this group of plays will show clearly what is meant. In 2 Henry IV., i. 3, 36, we have a passage, the corrupt state of which is acknowledged by all editors. To the assertion that it never does harm to presume on hope which is likely, Lord Bardolph replies

"Yes; if this present quality of war,

(Indeed the instant action, a cause on foot,)

Lives so in hope, as in an early spring

We see the appearing buds; which, to prove fruit,
Hope gives not so much warrant as despair

That frosts will bite them."

Here the Cambridge Shakspere gives, in note 4 to the play, a number of proposed corrections, which all appear unsatisfactory. But now suppose 'instant' to be a misprint for 'infant,' and the original line to have been

'Indeed the infant action, scarce on foot,'

which a careful reader of the passage will see to be the very sense required by the context. The corrector, heedless of the real text which he should have followed, as we can prove him by numberless evidences to have been, remarks that 'an instant action' and one 'scarce on foot'