HEN.--Therefore do thou, stiff-set Northumberland, Retire to Chester, and my cousin here, The noble Bedford, his to Glo’ster straight And give our Royal ordinance and word That in this fit and strife of empery No loss shall stand account. To this compulsion I pledge my sword, my person and my honour On the Great Seal of England: so farewell. Swift to your charges: nought was ever done Unless at some time it were first begun. This also is Shakespeare in his repose, but a better Shakespeare than he whom the Professor would challenge. For though there is here no work or strain in the thing, yet it reeks of English. It is like the mist over our valleys at evening, so effortless is it and so reposeful, and yet so native. Note the climax “On the Great Seal of England” and the quaint, characteristic folk-lore of the concluding couplet, with its rhyming effect. Note also how sparing is William Shakespeare of the strong qualificative, however just it may be. For when our moderns will speak hardly of “the tolerant kine” or “the under-lit sky,” or of “the creeping river like a worm upturned, with silver belly stiffened in the grass,” though they be by all this infinitely stronger, yet are they but the more condensed and self-belittled. Shakespeare will write you ten lines and have in all but one just and sharp adjective--“stiff-set;” for the rest they are a common highway; he cares not. And here he is in the by-paths; a meadow of Poesy. I have found it hidden away in one of the latter plays; the flowers of his decline:-- “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Now thine earthly task is done, Thou’rt gone home and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and lasses must, Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” There is in that a line I swear no one but Shakespeare would have dared. “Thou’rt gone home and ta’en thy wages.” Commonplace? A text on the wall? A sermon-tag? All you will, but a _frame for glory_. This then is William Shakespeare in a last word. A man at work full of doing; the Ϝ ἔργον: glad if you saw the mark of the chisel; still more glad if you did not see it. And if it be queried why are such things written of him? Why do we of the last and woful days turn and return the matter of our past? We say this. _Vixere Fortes_; that is, no fame were enduring save by continued iterance and echo of similar praise, nor any life well earned in the public sheets that dared not touch on any matter and remodel all. It is for ourselves and for William Shakespeare that these things are done. For ourselves, that is a private thing to hide under the veil of the Home-lofe. For William Shakespeare, that is the public duty, that his fame may not fail in the noise of new voices. And we can borrow from him and return to him what he said of another with such distinction of plane and delicate observance of value:--