In this glowing page of Shakspeare is preserved one of those exquisite, fascinating illusions which are scattered up and down throughout his never-dying remains, and which, arresting us everywhere, hold the willing imagination spell-bound, till, after reflection, Truth rises upon the mind, and with one gleam of her soft but omnipotent light varies the charm, and contrasts the satisfaction of reality with the pleasures of fiction. The poet's imagery paints to our mind's eye Harry Hotspur and Harry of Monmouth lying each in his "cradle-clothes" on some one and the same night, when the powers of Fairy-land might have exchanged the boys, and called Percy, Plantagenet. To effect such a change, however, of the first-born sons of Northumberland and Bolinbroke, an extent of power and skill must have been in requisition far beyond what their warmest advocates are wont to assign to those "night-tripping" personages. Hotspur was at least one-and-twenty years old when Henry of Monmouth "lay in his cradle-clothes." The pencil also of the painter has lent its aid to confirm and propagate the same delusion as to the relative ages of these two warriors. In the representation (for example) of the Battle-field of Shrewsbury, Hotspur and Henry, the heroes in the (p. 347) fore-ground, are models of two gallant youths, equal in age, struggling for the mastery: and in the chamber-scene, whilst Henry is represented in all the freshness of a beardless youth, his father shows the worn-out veteran; his brow and cheeks deeply furrowed, his whole frame borne down towards the grave by length of days as much as by infirmities, though when he died his age did not exceed his forty-seventh year.