name occurs, as will be seen, continuously in the State documents of the time. CHAPTER II PRINCE HENRY AND PRINCE HAL[2] He who would draw a portrait of Prince Henry finds himself anticipated by the work of a master hand, a work done in colours so fresh and vivid, and with outlines so firm, that rivalry is hopeless. Shakespeare’s “Prince Hal,” the reckless, brilliant lad, now bandying jests with bullies and sots in city taverns, now leading his troops to victory on the field of Shrewsbury, is one of those creations of genius which, be they true to history or untrue, never lose their hold on the minds of men. No sober description of the actual Henry, however accurately worked out of authentic details, can possibly supersede the figure which the great dramatist has made immortal. If I may borrow an illustration from literature, it is here as it is with Pope and the rival translators of Homer. Nothing could be more unlike the real _Iliad_ than the polished epigrammatic rhetoric of Pope’s version, yet it is so masterly a work, so splendid in style, so magnificent in versification that it is the despair of the most scholarly and the most faithful translators; whatever the learned may say, the world still reads “Pope’s Homer.” So the world will always think of Henry in his youth as the Prince Hal who spoils Falstaff of his ill-gotten booty at Gadshill, laughs at him and with him over his cups in Eastcheap, and soliloquises over his prostrate bulk at Shrewsbury. Many figures in history seem to bring up before us these curious _eidola_, which even the best information cannot wholly banish from our minds. Who can quite dissociate his conception of the first Cyrus from the figure which Xenophon has pourtrayed in his philosophical romance, or forget, when he thinks of Tiberius, the gloomy profligate and tyrant who stands out so vividly from the pages of Tacitus? The brilliant figure, then, of the first and second parts of _Henry the Fourth_ is at least a literary fact. I do not propose to enter on a connected discussion of its authenticity. There are many genuinely historical details which we have about Henry’s real personality, and we have at least some suggestions of the source from which the great dramatist drew his materials.