It does not, however, follow that the patriotic instinct of the Shakespearean gospel encourages blind adoration of state or country. Intelligent citizens of the Shakespearean world are never prohibited from honestly criticising the acts or aspirations of their fellows, and from seeking to change them when they honestly think they can be changed for the better. It is not the business of a discerning patriot to sing paeans in his nation's honour. His final aim is to help his country to realise the highest ideals of social and political conduct which are known to him, and to ensure for her the best possible "reputation through the world." Criticism conceived in a patriotic spirit should be constant and unflagging. The true patriot speaks out as boldly when he thinks the nation errs as when, in his opinion, she adds new laurels to her crown. The Shakespearean patriot applies a rigorous judgment to all conditions of his environment--both social and political. Throughout the English history plays Shakespeare bears convincing testimony to the right, and even to the duty, of the patriot to exercise in all seriousness his best powers of criticism on the political conduct of his fellow-citizens and of those who rule over him. Shakespeare's studies of English history are animated by a patriotism which boldly seeks and faces the truth. His dramatic presentations of English history have been often described as fragments of a national epic, as detached books of an English _Iliad_. But they embody no epic or heroic glorification of the nation. Taking the great series which begins chronologically with _King John_ and ends with _Richard III._ (_Henry VIII._ stands apart), we find that Shakespeare makes the central features of the national history the persons of the kings. Only in the case of _Henry V._ does he clothe an English king with any genuine heroism. Shakespeare's kings are as a rule but men as we are. The violet smells to them as it does to us; all their senses have but human conditions; and though their affections be higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop they stoop with like wing. Excepting _Henry V._, the history plays are tragedies. They "tell sad stories of the death of kings." But they do not merely illustrate the crushing burdens of kingship or point the moral of the hollowness of kingly pageantry; they explain why kingly glory is in its essence brittle rather than brilliant. And since Shakespeare's rulers reflect rather than inspire the character of the nation, we are brought to a study of the causes of the brittleness of national glory.