"Let not the world see fear, and sad distrust, Govern the motion of a kingly eye: Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire; Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow Of bragging horror: so shall inferior eyes, That borrow their behaviours from the great, Grow great by your example, and put on The dauntless spirit of resolution." Faulconbridge is in this play the spokesman of the patriotic spirit. But we realise how strong was Shakespeare's determination to make this string sound at all hazards, when we find that the first eulogy of England is placed in the mouth of England's enemy, Limoges, the slayer of Cœur-de-Lion, who speaks (ii. I) of-- "that pale, that white'-fac'd shore, Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides, And coops from other lands her islanders, ... that England, hedg'd in with the main, That water-walled bulwark, still secure And confident from foreign purposes." How slight is the difference between the eulogistic style of the two mortal enemies, when Faulconbridge, who has in the meantime killed Limoges, ends the play with a speech, which is, however, only slightly adapted from the older text:-- "This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror. . . . . . . . . Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true." Next to Faulconbridge, Constance is the character who bears the weight of the play; and its weakness arises in great part from the fact that Shakespeare has killed her at the end of the third act. So lightly is her death treated, that it is merely announced in passing by the mouth of a messenger. She does not appear at all after her son Arthur is put out of the way, possibly because Shakespeare feared to lengthen the list of sorrowing and vengeful mothers already presented in his earlier histories. He has treated this figure with a marked predilection, such as he usually manifests for those characters which, in one way or another, forcibly oppose every compromise with lax worldliness and euphemistic conventionality. He has not only endowed her with the most passionate and enthusiastic motherly love, but with a wealth of feeling and of imagination which gives her words a certain poetic magnificence. She wishes that "her tongue were in the thunder's mouth, Then with a passion would she shake the world" (iii. 4). She is sublime in her grief for the loss of her son:-- "I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop. To me, and to the state of my great grief, Let kings assemble; . . . . . . Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. _Seats herself on the ground."_