The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style in common which has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excess of action or passion, and far in excess of poetry. They are not as yet perfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of his first stage in performance as in promise. Compared with the full and living figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaret of Anjou is the mere sketch of a poet still in his pupilage: John and Henry, Faulconbridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the hand which drew the second and third Richard without much background or dramatic perspective. But the difficulties inherent in either subject are not surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very point of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have been something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work--a loadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well as to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rock of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it. His perfect triumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfect maturity of his comic genius and his general style, has now to show itself. The great national trilogy which is at once the flower of Shakespeare's second period and the crown of his achievements in historic drama--unless indeed we so far depart from the established order and arrangement of his works as to include his three Roman plays in the same class with these English histories--offers perhaps the most singular example known to us of the variety in fortune which befell his works on their first appearance in print. None of these had better luck in that line at starting than _King Henry IV_.; none had worse than _King Henry V_. With _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and _Hamlet_, it shares the remarkable and undesirable honour of having been seized and boarded by pirates even before it had left the dockyard. The masterbuilder's hands had not yet put the craft into seaworthy condition when she was overhauled by these Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those four plays, the two tragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewritten from end to end: the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first came from the poet's hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modified and incalculably improved. Not quite so much can be said of the comedy, which certainly stood in less need of revision, and probably would not have borne it so well; nevertheless every little passing touch of the reviser's hand is here also a noticeable mark of invigoration and improvement. But _King Henry V_., we may fairly say, is hardly less than transformed. Not that it has been recast after the fashion of _Hamlet_, or even rewritten after the fashion of _Romeo and Juliet_; but the