War, again, was ancient enough in itself, and so indeed were the fundamental rules of military art; but the outward face of war and the whole scheme of manœuvres, tactics, and fortification, had passed or were still passing through critical change due to the general use of fire-arms. Henry VIII.’s castles embodied the latest designs of Italian engineers, and English archery was already decaying though shooting at butts was still a matter of legal duty. Many details of armament and the like were in a state of transition, and came to rest only about the end of the seventeenth century, a rest which was little troubled for a century more. I need hardly remind you that Marlborough would have found very few novelties in Wellington’s army, save for such trifles as the cock of a hat, and the recognition—still not wholly without grudging—of gunners as being soldiers and not mere auxiliary artificers. Shakespeare found the art of war in such a swift new growth as was not to happen again till the times of which I can remember the beginning. It would seem offhand, therefore, as if we ought to find, in the writing of so keen an observer as Shakespeare, considerable marks of these innovations, and some evidence of intelligent curiosity about their working: not so much, indeed, as would prove Shakespeare either an ambassador or a soldier, though I believe some ingenious persons have let their fancy go so far even as that. But in fact my search up and down the plays has led me to think that Shakespeare the playwright could do nothing with the modern diplomatic art, even if he had any knowledge of it, and that he never troubled himself much about the revolution in the art of war. Observe, I say Shakespeare the playwright. We have very little evidence of Shakespeare’s private pursuits and tastes outside the theatre, and for aught we know he may have been interested in matters for which the stage had no use, or which he did not choose to show there for other reasons. Observe also that beyond question the externals of both diplomacy and war figure in Shakespeare’s works, and those of war rather abundantly. You shall find passages of embassies and ambassadors, many fighting men, a fair number of fights on the stage, not counting brawls and private encounters, and plenty of talk about guns and gunpowder. Fire-arms might still have a smack of novelty at Stratford-on-Avon when William Shakespeare was a lad. And yet he thought them (if he thought at all) older than they were, for we read of cannon in ‘King John’ a century and more before they came into use, and about half a century before Roger Bacon made a cracker. As there is not a word about Magna Carta in ‘King John,’ nor in the older play on which Shakespeare worked, some persons may guess that ‘the troublesome raigne of John, King of England’ was a very dark age to Elizabethan playwrights. But for my part I would rather believe the omission to be a deliberate touch of dramatic fitness.