But the dramatist's main energies are devoted to exposure of the hollowness of this counsel of perfection. Temptations to vice beset rulers of men to a degree that is unknown to their subjects. To avarice rulers are especially prone. Stanchless avarice constantly converts kings of ordinary clay into monsters. How often they forge Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal, Destroying them for wealth. (_Macbeth_, IV., iii., 83-4.) Intemperance in all things--in business and pleasure--is a standing menace of monarchs. Boundless intemperance In Nature is a tyranny: it hath been Th' untimely emptying of the happy throne And fail of many kings. (_Macbeth_, IV., iii., 66-9.) A leader of men, if he be capable of salvation, must "delight no less in truth than life." Yet "truth," for the most part, is banished from the conventional environment of royalty. Repeatedly does Shakespeare bring into dazzling relief the irony which governs the being of kings. Want of logic and defiance of ethical principle underlie their pride in magnificent ceremonial and pageantry. The ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual limits of human destiny is a text which Shakespeare repeatedly clothes in golden language. It is to be admitted that nearly all the kings in Shakespeare's gallery frankly acknowledge the make-believe and unreality which dogs regal pomp and ceremony. In self-communion they acknowledge the ruler's difficulty in finding truth in their traditional scope of life. In a great outburst on the night before Agincourt, Henry V.--the only king whom Shakespeare seems thoroughly to admire--openly describes the inevitable confusion between fact and fiction which infects the conditions of royalty. Anxiety and unhappiness are so entwined with ceremonial display as to deprive the king of the reliefs and recreations which freely lie at the disposal of ordinary men.