In the poetic representation of that state of things which was to be redressed, the central social figure must, of course, have its place. For it is the Poet, the Experimental Poet, unseen indeed, deep buried in his fable, his new movements all hidden under its old garb, and deeper hidden still, in the new splendours he puts on it--it is the Poet--invisible but not the less truly, he,--it is the Scientific Poet, who comes upon the monarch in his palace at noonday, and says, 'My business is with thee, O king.' It is he who comes upon the selfish arrogant old despot, drunk with Elizabethan flatteries, stuffed with '_titles blown_ from adulation,' unmindful of the true ends of government, reckless of the duties which that regal assumption of the common weal brings with it--it is the Poet who comes upon this Doctor of Laws in the palace and prescribes to him a course of treatment which the royal patient himself, when once it has taken effect, is ready to issure from the hovel's mouth, in the form of a general prescription and state ordinance. 'Take physic, POMP; Expose thyself to _feel_ what wretches _feel_, That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. Oh, I have taken _too little care_ of This!' It is that same Poet who has already told us, confidentially, under cover of King Hal's mantle, that 'the king himself is but a man' and that 'all his senses have but human conditions and that his affections, too, though higher mounted when they stoop, stoop with the like wing; that his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man';--it is that same Poet, and, in carrying out the purpose of this play, it has come in his way now to make good that statement. For it was necessary to his purpose here, to show that the State is composed throughout, down to its most loathsome unimaginable depths of neglect and misery, of individual men, social units, clothed of nature with the same faculties and essential human dignities and susceptibilities to good and evil, and crowned of nature with the common sovereignty of reason,--down-trodden, perhaps, and wrung and trampled out of them, but elected of nature to that dignity; it was necessary to show this, in order that the wisdom of the State which sacrifices to the senses of _one_ individual man, and the judgment that is narrowed by the one man's senses, the weal of the whole,--in order that the wisdom of the State, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary will and passions of _the one_, the weal of _the many_, might be mathematically exhibited,--might be set down in figures and diagrams. For this is that Poet who represents this method of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to _the eye_. This is that same Poet, too, who surprises elsewhere _a queen_ in her swooning passion of grief, and bids her murmur to us her recovering confession.