then, the force of Hotspur is but transient youth, the common heat of youth, in him. The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi faineant, with La Pucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course of Shakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the "holy Henry." Richard the Third, touched, like John, with an effect of real heroism, is spoiled like him by something of criminal madness, and reaches his highest level of tragic expression [191] when circumstances reduce him to terms of mere human nature.-- A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! The Princes in the Tower recall to mind the lot of young Arthur:-- I'll go with thee, And find the inheritance of this poor child, His little kingdom of a forced grave. And when Shakespeare comes to Henry the Eighth, it is not the superficial though very English splendour of the king himself, but the really potent and ascendant nature of the butcher's son on the one hand, and Katharine's subdued reproduction of the sad fortunes of Richard the Second on the other, that define his central interest.* With a prescience of the Wars of the Roses, of which his errors were the original cause, it is Richard who best exposes Shakespeare's own constant sentiment concerning war, and especially that sort of civil war which was then recent in English memories. The soul of Shakespeare, certainly, was not wanting in a sense of the magnanimity of warriors. The grandiose aspects of war, its magnificent apparelling, he records [192] monumentally enough--the "dressing of the lists," the lion's heart, its unfaltering haste thither in all the freshness of youth and morning.-- Not sick although I have to do with death-- The sun doth gild our armour: Up, my Lords!-- I saw young Harry with his beaver on, His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd, Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury. Only, with Shakespeare, the afterthought is immediate:-- They come like sacrifices in their trim. --Will it never be to-day? I will trot to-morrow a mile, and my way shall be paved with English faces. This sentiment Richard reiterates very plaintively, in association with the delicate sweetness of the English fields, still sweet and fresh, like London and her other fair towns in that England of Chaucer, for whose soil the exiled Bolingbroke is made to long so dangerously, while Richard on his return from Ireland salutes it-- That pale, that white-fac'd shore,-- As a long-parted mother with her child.-- So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth! And do thee favour with my royal hands.-- Then (of Bolingbroke) Ere the crown he looks for live in peace, Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons Shall ill become the flower of England's face; Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace To scarlet indignation, and bedew My pastures' grass with faithful English blood.-- [193] Why have they dared to march?-- asks York,