Yet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking "revival" of King Richard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were very young thirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare's play could ever have been before--the very person of the king based on the stately old portrait in Westminster Abbey, "the earliest extant contemporary likeness of any English sovereign," the grace, the winning pathos, the sympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful archaeology confronting vulgar modern London with a scenic reproduction, for once really agreeable, of the London of Chaucer. In the hands of Kean the play became like an exquisite performance on the violin. The long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his "tragic abdication" till the hour in which he Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood, was for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became early the theme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied surviving favourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work. The king Richard of Yngland Was in his flowris then regnand: But his flowris efter sone Fadyt, and ware all undone:-- says the old chronicle. Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes him an over-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which people in Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general right, sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable personal gift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast and shoulders--of the "holy oil" of his consecration at Westminster; not, however, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at the coronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by the Blessed Virgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Richard himself found that, it was said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis of his changing fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecration therewith--understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happier rival. And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, the learned care, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only eleven years of age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, was carried away in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197] since continued. And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as in Richard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites were calculated to produce. Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king,-- as supplementing another, almost supernatural, right.--"Edward's seven sons," of whom Richard's father was one, Were as seven phials of his sacred blood.