Gloucester in "Henry VI." (Part 2, Act 2, Sc. 4) notes the fickleness of the masses. He says, addressing his absent wife: "Sweet Nell, ill can thy noble mind abrook The abject people, gazing on thy face With envious looks, laughing at thy shame, That erst did follow thy proud chariot wheels When thou didst ride in triumph through the streets." When she arrives upon the scene in disgrace, she says to him: "Look how they gaze; See how the giddy multitude do point And nod their heads and throw their eyes on thee. Ah, Gloster, hide thee from their hateful looks." And she calls the crowd a "rabble" (Ib.), a term also used in "Hamlet" (Act 4, Sc. 5). Again, in part III. of "Henry VI.," Clifford, dying on the battlefield while fighting for King Henry, cries: "The common people swarm like summer flies, And whither fly the gnats but to the sun? And who shines now but Henry's enemies?" (Act 2, Sc. 6.) And Henry himself, conversing with the keepers who have imprisoned him in the name of Edward IV., says: "Ah, simple men! you know not what you swear. Look, as I blow this feather from my face, And as the air blows it to me again, Obeying with my wind when I do blow, And yielding to another when it blows, Commanded always by the greater gust, Such is the lightness of you common men." (Ib., Act 3, Sc. 1.) Suffolk, in the First Part of the same trilogy (Act 5, Sc. 5), talks of "worthless peasants," meaning, perhaps, "property-less peasants," and when Salisbury comes to present the demands of the people, he calls him "the Lord Ambassador Sent from a sort of tinkers to the king," (Part 2, Act 3, Sc. 2.) and says: "'Tis like the Commons, rude unpolished hinds Could send such message to their sovereign." Cardinal Beaufort mentions the "uncivil kernes of Ireland" (Ib., Part 2, Act 3, Sc. 1), and in the same play the crowd makes itself ridiculous by shouting, "A miracle," when the fraudulent beggar Simpcox, who had pretended to be lame and blind, jumps over a stool to escape a whipping (Act 2, Sc. 1). Queen Margaret receives petitioners with the words "Away, base cullions" (Ib., Act 1, Sc. 3), and among other flattering remarks applied here and there to the lower classes we may cite the epithets "ye rascals, ye rude slaves," addressed to a crowd by a porter in Henry VIII., and that of "lazy knaves" given by the Lord Chamberlain to the porters for having let in a "trim rabble" (Act 5, Sc. 3). Hubert, in King John, presents us with an unvarnished picture of the common people receiving the news of Prince Arthur's death: