false friends and her ruthless enemies, Mrs. Jameson applies, most appropriately, the image of the mother eagle, wounded and bleeding to death, yet stretched over her young in an attitude of defiance, while all the baser birds of prey are clamoring around her eyrie. The noble Bastard, whose heart seems to be always in the right place, feels deeply the injustice of the act of the two kings:

"Mad world! mad kings! mad composition!
John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole,
Hath willingly departed with a part,

And France, whose armour conscience buckled on,
Whom zeal and charity brought to the field
As God's own soldier, rounded * in the ear
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker, that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,

Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity,
Commodity, † the bias of the world," etc.

There's a sort of reflex action induced in his mind, which causes him to slander himself. After representing self-interest as the bias of the world, he continues:

All this is pure self-slander, as his subsequent disinterested and magnanimous acts and words show.

The league entered into by the two kings (first proposed by the besieged citizens of Angiers), A. II. Sc. i., is severed by Pandulph, the Pope's legate, who demands of John, why, against the authority of the Church, he keeps Stephen Langton, chosen archbishop of Canterbury, from that holy see. To this demand John returns a defiant answer (A. III. Sc. i. 147-160). The legate, thereupon, by the power that he has, declares him "curs'd and excommunicate," and commands Philip, on peril of a curse, to let go the hand of the arch-heretic, and raise the power of France upon his head, unless he submit himself to Rome. The consequence is, that Philip, after begging the Cardinal, under the circumstances, to devise some other means, and after being entreated by Constance, Austria, and Lewis, to submit to the Cardinal, and by Elinor and Blanch, to stand fast, falls off from John (though he is manifestly not convinced by the argument of the legate that it is his duty to do so), and hostilities are resumed. The French forces are worsted; they lose Angiers, and Arthur is taken prisoner by John, and conveyed to England. This gives a turn to, and complicates, things at home which will prove fatal to John. He is now forced, by circumstances resulting from the capture of Arthur, to play a losing game within his own kingdom. His fears as to the young and interesting captive, whose misfortune wins the sympathies of the courtiers and the people, drive him to measures for his own safety which deprive him of all chance of safety. He passes, irresistibly, into the power of an avenging fate. The dramatic situation, at this stage of the play, is in Shakespeare's best tragic manner. The moral baseness of John, which seals his doom, may be said to be gathered up, and exhibited in its extreme intensity, in the scene with Hubert, the 3d of the 3d Act, in which he intimates to Hubert his wish to have the little prince put out of the way: and in the 2d Scene of the 4th Act, where he accuses the aptness of the instrument as the cause of the suggestion. I would call special attention to the last 19 verses of John's long speech (A. III. Sc. iii. 30-50), beginning, "If the midnight bell." The thought keeps on the wing through all these 19 verses. There is a moral signifi

cance in the suspended construction of the language. The mind of the dastard king hovers over the subject of the ungodly act and dares not alight upon it; and the verse, in its uncadenced movement, admirably registers the speaker's state of mind:

"If the midnight bell

Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth,
Sound on into the drowsy race of night;

If this same were a church-yard where we stand,
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs,
Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,

Had bak'd thy blood and made it heavy, thick,
Which else runs tickling up and down the veins,
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes,
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment,

A passion hateful to my purposes,

Or if that thou could see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,

Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words;
Then, in despite of brooded watchful day,
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts;

But, ah, I will not! yet I love thee well;

And, by my troth, I think thou lov'st me well."

The loveliness of Arthur is the most fully exhibited in the scene with Hubert, the 1st of the 4th Act, where he entreats Hubert to spare his eyes. The pathos of the situation is pushed to the verge of the painful. The highest art was demanded here to keep the treatment of the subject within the domain of the beautiful. And it is so kept.

I need not trace the dramatic action further. From the point reached, to the end, there are no new movements. King John is now in a current which he cannot stem, and will be swept helplessly along to the bitter end.

Shakespeare is always true to the fatality of overmastering passion of every kind. To the extent that his characters forfeit the

power of self-assertion, do they become subject to fate, and are swept along by circumstances. This, of course, is a universal, an obvious, a self-evident, truth; but it is a truth which the inferior sort of dramatists do not always observe, in their treatment of great passions, and their work is, in consequence, wanting in moral proportion..

The dramatists of the Restoration period do not observe it; and whatever mechanical symmetry they attain to, in their plays, true moral proportion is wanting. The dramatic criticism of that period, Rymer's, for example, shows that the moral proportion of Shakespeare's plays was but little recognized. This is shown, too, by the rifacimenti of some of his plays which were perpetrated by Dryden, Davenant, Tate, and others. Tate's Lear is a signal example. Poetic justice meant something other with these dramatic carpenters, than the justly poetic.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

MUCH in

ADO ABOUT NOTHING appeared for the first time, in 4to, in 1600, with the following title: "Much adoe about Nothing. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. London. Printed by V. S. for Andrew Wise, and William Aspley. 1600."

The word "nothing" appears to have been pronounced in Shakespeare's day, "noting"; and in A. II. Sc. iii. 57, there's a play on the two words. Balthasar says:

"Note this before my notes;

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting."

To which Don Pedro replies:

66

Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks;

Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing."

The last word was changed by Theobald to "noting."

Richard Grant White sees the same pun in the title of the play. "The play is Much Ado about Nothing," he says, "only in a very vague and general sense, but Much Ado about Noting in one especially apt and descriptive; for the much ado is produced entirely by noting. It begins with the noting of the Prince and Claudio, first by Antonio's man, and then by Borachio, who reveals their confidence to John; it goes on with Benedick noting the Prince, Leonato, and Claudio, in the garden, and again with Beatrice noting Margaret and Ursula in the same place; the incident upon which its action turns is the noting of Borachio's interview with