Let us take leave of Henry V. with the remark that Shakespeare by his mouth anticipates Wellington’s policy and rebukes the Prussian devil’s gospel of frightfulness. ‘We give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.’ And this is the Shakespeare whom the Germans pretend to understand better than his own countrymen. It is curious that the longest string of military terms in Shakespeare, if I mistake not, is delivered by a woman, when Lady Percy tells Hotspur (I. ‘King Henry IV.’ ii. 3) that he has talked in his sleep ‘Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents, Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets, Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin, Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain, And all the currents of a heady fight.’ Some of the plays, like ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Coriolanus,’ are martial, inasmuch as there are combats and ‘excursions,’ but not military, inasmuch as the fighting is but the inducement or vehicle of some greater tragic event. Plutarch furnishes brave Roman sayings, or the politic sense of Elizabethan elders is condensed in aphoristic lines; but all this is secondary; what really concerns the poet is a spiritual conflict of eternal import, a soul triumphing though at the cost of life or wrecked. War and peace, conquest and exile, are the transitory matter the spirit works in, and Shakespeare troubles himself no more about the details than is needful for preserving a congruous atmosphere.