It is certain that their richness, their brilliancy, their attraction, lie in the emotional representation of practical activity. Bolingbroke ascends the throne, by the adoption of violent and tortuous means, knowing when to withdraw himself and when to dare. Later he recounts to his son how artfully he composed and maintained the attitude, which caused him to be looked upon with sympathy and reverence by the people, affecting humility and humanity, but preserving at the same time the element of the marvellous, so that his presence, _like a robe pontifical,_ was _ne'er seen but wondered at._ He causes the blood of the deposed king to be shed, while protesting after the deed his great grief _that blood should sprinkle me to make me grow,_ and promising to undertake a voyage of expiation to the Holy Land. Facing him is the falling monarch, Richard II, in whose breast consciousness of his own sacred character as legitimate sovereign and of the inviolable dignity attached to it, the sense of being to blame, of pride humiliated, of resignation to destiny or divine decree, of bitterness, of sarcasm towards himself and towards others, succeed, alternate and combat one another, a swarm of writhing sentiments, an agony of suffocated passions. "O, that I were as great As is my grief, or lesser than my name! Or that I could forget what I have been! Or not remember what I must be now! Swell'st thou, proud heart? I'll give thee scope to beat...." Elsewhere we find the same inexorable conqueror, Bolingbroke, as Henry IV, triumphant on several occasions against different enemies, now infirm and approaching death, raving from lack of sleep, and envying the meanest of his subjects, blindly groping in the vain shadows of human effort, as once his conquered predecessor, and filled with terror, as he views the whole extent of the universe and the "Revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea!... And changes fill the cup of alteration With divers liquors! O, if this were seen, The happiest youth,--viewing his progress through What perils past, what crosses to ensue,-- Would shut the book and sit him down and die." And hearing of some friends becoming estranged and of others changing into enemies, he is no longer indignant nor astonished: "Are these things then necessities? Then let us meet them as necessities." Henry V meditates upon the singular condition of kings, upon their majesty, which separates them from all other men and by thus elevating, loads them with a weight equal to that which all men together have to carry, while taking from them the joys given to others, and depriving them of hearing the truth or of obtaining justice.