O beat away the busy meddling fiend That lays strong siege upon this wretch’s soul, And from his bosom purge this black despair.” See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts intent, bids “peace to his soul,” in parting, “if God’s pleasure be.” And then the monarch solemnly, urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: “Lord cardinal, if thou think’st on heaven’s bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope.” But the cardinal—dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, “He dies, and makes no sign: O God, forgive him!” Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a death argues a monstrous life,” he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto:— “FORBEAR TO JUDGE, _for we are sinners all_. ... Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close; And let us all to meditation.” Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him of his uncle Gloster’s death being due to violence, he yet restrains the bent of his convictions by the prayer,— “O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts: My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey’s life! If my suspèct be false, forgive me, God; For judgment only doth belong to Thee!” It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey’s death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to _be_ the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king’s _forbear_. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion:— “And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven? But, in our circumstance and course of thought, ’Tis heavy with him.” Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.