the principal events. If we have rightly interpreted this, we shall see its idea reflected in all the secondary characters. The plans of the king of France, the Dauphin and the Archduke of Austria, fail, because the corrupt and grasping policy on which they are founded are utterly destructive of the very notion of political society, and with them the hopes of Blanche are wrecked. The conduct of the English barons is naturally explained by their position relatively to the sovereign power in general, and to the usurped dignity of John in particular. Where the whole frame is sick, the separate members cannot well be sound. As to the fortunes of Constance and Arthur, although they are primarily but an episode in the life and character of John, yet it is with great significance that they appear to be thus interwoven with the history of the state. The instruction they furnish forms a pendant to the general lesson of the piece; for they teach us that nothing in history more invariably meets its due punishment than weakness and passionthose hereditary failings of the female character. Women ought not to interfere in history, for history demands action, and for that they are constitutionally disqualified. The haste and impatience with which Constance labours to establish her son's rights, who, however, from his very minority, is as yet unsuited for a crown, justly involves him as well as herself in ruin. Arthur, therefore, although preserved by the compassion of Hubert, must nevertheless perish. Had his mother but had the prudence to wait until he could himself have asserted his own rights by his own arm, and when alone he could have possessed a perfect title, he could have gained for himself and her what lawfully belonged to them.

No objection against the historical dramatist can justly be drawn from the facts that Robert Faulconbridge is no purely historical figure, but one that belongs rather to the popular legends of his country, or that the life of the Archduke of Austria is lengthened considerably beyond the truth, and mixed up with matters in which he really took no part, or from the poetical modification and colouring of many other minor parts of detail. The dramatist is the courtpoet, and not the court-servant of history; documentary accuracy is not his business, but that of the keeper of archives, with whom he has nothing in common. It were indeed a great mistake to require of the poet historical fidelity and diplomatic accuracy in all his

details. Often, indeed, he cannot be historically true, except by being false in some things. There is a mass of little details and external circumstances which, humanly judging, might have been altogether different, without affecting their truth and significance (their fundamental idea), which is derived from the larger momenta of the historical development. Every great event, like every great character, has around him a number of satellites, the assistants and ministers of his plans, the selection of which depends on his arbitrary choice, and which, therefore, might well have been different from what they actually are. All that the poet has to do is to give again the chief moments of history in their true import, and to illustrate the ground-idea in all the represented collection of deeds and events, and by the chief characteristic of the acting personages, with true historical fidelity; all besides must be left at the free disposal of his artistic judgment. The greater poet he is, the less need will he have to alter, and the more will his free creations be historical poetry; i. e. the more strictly will they be composed in conformity and in character with the represented ground-idea. It is only thus that he can elucidate historical truth; thus only can an historical event be made an object of art without infringing the restraints which the artistic form lays upon the poet. The preceding remarks apply more or less to all Shakspeare's historical dramas, and we now make them once for all. The reign of King John, so important historically, and yet so weak and undignified in itself, required pre-eminently a free poetical handling. The conflicting interests and disorganization of the political body, the fluctuations of fortune, and the vacillations of a selfish political prudence-the oscillations backwards and forwards of the course of history before it could assure its proper result-the multiplicity of actors and events; all required to be reduced and concentrated on certain, fixed, leading, and distinctly prominent phenomena. Shakspeare, therefore, has necessarily made use of representatives: the ardent chivalric enthusiasm of the thirteenth century is represented by Faulconbridge, whose opposite, the hollow, fair-spoken Archduke, represents the growing relation between the English and German nations, while both are equally necessary to represent the past history of the noble Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The papacy has its

representative in the person of Pandulph, the English nobility in Salisbury and Norfolk, and those useful, subordinate agents, who in such periods of confusion aggrandize themselves, have theirs in Hubert de Burgh; while the medieval superstition-that caricature of the energetic faith of the church-is embodied in Peter of Pomfret. The fall of the Austrian Archduke by the hand of Faulconbridge is a necessary consequence of the relative position of these two characters; poetico-historical justice demanded the punishment of the Archduke for his unjust imprisonment of Richard the First, and the son of the injured party was naturally the fitting instrument of such poetical retribution. And here, also, the poet has but condensed into one prominent trait a multitude of circumstances which in the actual history are spread over a wide space.

The resolution of the nice critical question, when this unquestionably genuine play of Shakspeare's was composed, is so intimately connected with the no less disputable point whether the still extant older "King John" be or not a juvenile production of our poet, that I must postpone the consideration of both to the next section, to which the latter properly belongs. "Richard the Second" may for many reasons be regarded as the companion of "King John." While John employs every evil means to maintain his usurped dignity, Richard forfeits his just right by a weak use of it. The vitality of history endures no abstract, dead notion. The fixed formula of an outward, legal, and conventional right, is as nothing in the sight of history, for which nothing is right but what is truly so, as having its foundation in morality. This Richard has forfeited before the eyes of men, by treading it himself under foot. The highest earthly power is not exempt from the eternal laws of the universe; the majesty which is by the grace of God loses its title as soon as it abandons its only foundation in the grace of God, whose justice acknowledges no jurisprudence, no rights of family and inheritance, as against the immutable rights of truth and reason. Richard urges in vain his legal title and the sacred name of majesty; to no purpose does he invoke the angels of Him who set him on the throne; the rights and title of a king avail not to move a straw, because they are devoid of the mighty force of inward rectitude; God

will send no angel to protect him who has rejected His grace. The people, too, in turn abandon him who had first abandoned them. The injustice of rebellion prevails. The truly noble, but spoiled and corrupted nature of Richard, wanes before the prudence and moderation of Bolingbroke. However little of true moral power Henry the Fourth subsequently exhibits, nevertheless, as contrasted with the unworthy and most unkingly conduct of Richard, he looks a model of virtue, and designed by nature for a throne. In the doubtful scale a grain of sand turns the balance.

Under such an unkingly sovereign the people are of necessity plunged in dissension and misery. At the very opening of the piece we behold the nobility divided by party feuds; the people in Ireland in revolt against their lords, and the royal family itself distracted with hatred and dissension. The Duchess of Gloster bewails her husband's unjust fate, while Richard's arbitrary termination of the quarrel between Norfolk and Bolingbroke throws the aged Gaunt upon his death-bed with sorrow for his banished son. In vain does he warn the king; truth dies away on the ear which flattery has stopped. Caprice follows upon caprice, accumulating infamy upon infamy. Henry lets out his kingdom to farm, and rapaciously confiscates the property of the House of Lancaster to furnish the expenses necessary for putting down the rebellion in Ireland. While he trusts to his hereditary claims and to the divine right of kings, he nevertheless violates all the right of family and inheritance, and, by putting his own divine office out to hire, he becomes, with suicidal inconsistency, the first rebel, and with his own hand sows the seed of the revolution which eventually robs him of his life and crown. By disregarding in his own person the rights of the historical past-which is the true meaning of the so-called principle of stability-he places himself on an unsubstantial future. None but the more aged of his subjects -those who live on in a better past, who still see in him his heroic and noble-minded father, such as the old York and his sons, the Bishop of Carlisle, and the old Salisbury-remain faithful to him; all the vigour of youth and manhood, on the other hand, that from its very nature is engrossed by the present and future, which, however undermined by Richard, totters and threatens to fall, hesitates also, and at last goes over to the rebel Boling

broke. Here, too, the guiding hand of God is discernible. Had Richard returned one day sooner from Ireland, he would have found an army ready equipped for battle; but deceived by the accidental delay, and a rumour of the death of the king, it had dispersed or gone over to Henry. His resources being thus cut off, lost to himself, and powerless, he yields himself into the hands of his enemy; his spirit, like a rotten stem, is broken by the storm which he himself had raised. His creatures, Bushby, Bagot, Greene, and Wiltshire-the wicked instruments of a wicked master, who did but confirm him in his injustice-had previously fallen like the branches before the stem. His Queen-even in prosperity oppressed with a nameless pang, and looking into the future with a foreboding fear and assured feeling that nothing but misfortune could be the issue of Richard's unrighteous deeds, but who yet could be the partner of her husband's unkingly dissipation, and who at the death-bed of the old Gaunt could listen in silence to his fruitless exhortations, and hear without remonstrance the insults of Richard, and his unjust order for the spoliation of the House of Lancaster-she naturally, and with justice, shares her consort's fate. Both, however, alike make misfortune great; the way in which they meet their fate reconciles them both to God and man, and the close of the tragedy is at once truly tragic and profoundly poetical.

A single idea, it is plain, runs through the whole piece and its several parts. The poet has here laboured to illustrate the high historical significance of the kingly dignity in the light that it appears to the christian view of things, as the most exalted, but at the same time the most responsible vocation, that Heaven imposes upon man. Absolutely speaking, every man has no doubt his vocation from God; but whereas the duties and office of every individual member of the state are more or less modified by the governing power, the dignity of the sovereign stands in an immediate relation to God and his all-ruling grace. It pre-eminently is "by the grace of God." And, both on this account, and because, as Shakspeare shews, the happiness of the whole people depends on the sovereign, he ought to be only the more mindful of divine grace, and the greater is his guilt, whenever, forgetting