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of pencil, is the account of his predecessor, immediately following that of himself; where we may see that he has the same piercing insight of men as of means, and has made Richard's follies and vices his tutors; from his miscarriages learning how to supplant him, and perhaps encouraging his errors, that he might make a ladder of them, to mount up and overtop him. And how his penetrating and remorseless sagacity is flashed forth in Hotspur's outbursts of rage at his demanding all the prisoners taken at Homildon; wherein that roll of living fire is snappish enough to be sure, but then he snaps out much truth. And his artful practice is still more forcibly apparent in what the same person says of him on the eve of the battle at Shrewsbury, representing him as shrewdly and unscrupulously encouraging rebellion, that he might use the rebels till he was strong enough to do without them, or to crush them if they got in his way. And long afterwards, in his "very latest counsel" to the prince, we have his deep subtle policy working out, like a passion strong in death; yet its workings come forth suffused with gushes of right feeling, thus showing that after all he was not all politician; that beneath his firm close-knit prudence there was a soul of moral sense, a kernel of religion. And it is quite observable how the Poet, following the leadings both of nature and of history, makes him to be plagued by foes springing up in his own bosom in proportion as he ceases to be worried by external enemies; the crown beginning to scald his brows as soon as he has put down those who would pluck it from him. Moreover, the workings of conscience arm the irregularities of his son with the stings of a providential retribution: though not ignorant of the prince's noble and gentle qualities, and of the encouragement they offer, yet the knowledge of his own mistreadings fills him with apprehensions of the worst; his very virtues, his patriotism and paternal love, being thus turned into ministers of sorrow by the memory of his former deeds.

But though policy was perhaps the leading trait in the character of this great man, nevertheless it was not so

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prominent but that other and better ones were strongly visible. And even in his policy there was much of the breadth and largeness which go to distinguish the statesman from the politician. Besides, he was a man of great spirit and prodigious bravery, had a real eye to the interests of his country as well as of his family, and in his wars he was humane much above the custom of his time. So that the more we study what he was and what he did, the more we shall probably be inclined to say with "well-languaged Daniel,"

"And, Lancaster, indeed, I would thy cause
Had had as lawful and as sure a ground,
As had thy virtues and thy noble heart,
Ordain'd and born for an imperial part."

How different is the atmosphere which waits upon that marvellous group of rebel war-chiefs, whereof Hotspur is the soul, and where chivalry reigns as supremely as wit and humor do in the haunts of Falstaff. It is exceedingly difficult to speak of Hotspur satisfactorily; not indeed because the lines of his character are not bold and prominent enough, but rather because they are so much so. For his frame is greatly disproportioned, which causes him to be all the more distinguishable, and perhaps to seem larger than he really is; and one of his leading excesses manifests itself in a wiry, close-twisted, red-hot speech, which burns into the mind such an impression of him as must needs make any commentary seem prosaic and dull. There is no mistaking him: no character in Shakespeare stands more apart in plenitude of peculiarity; and stupidity itself can hardly so disguise or disfeature him with criticism, but that he will still be recognized by any one that has ever seen him. He is as much a monarch in his sphere as the king and Falstaff are in theirs; only they rule more by power, he by emphasis and stress: there is something in them that takes away the will and spirit of resistance; he makes every thing bend to his arrogant, domineering, capricious temper. Who that has been with him in the scenes at the palace and at Bangor, can ever forget his bounding,

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sarcastic, overbearing spirit? How he hits all about him, and makes the feathers fly wherever he hits! it seems as if his tongue could go through the world, and strew the road behind it with splinters. And how steeped his speech every where is in the poetry of the sword! In what compact and sinewy platoons and squadrons the words march out of his mouth in bristling rank and file! as if from his birth he had been cradled on the iron breast of war. How doubly charged he is, in short, with the electricity of chivalry! insomuch that you can touch him nowhere but that he will give you a shock.

In those two scenes, what with Hotspur, and what with Glendower, the poetry is as unrivalled in its kind as the wit and humor in the best scenes at Eastcheap. What a dressing Hotspur gives the silken courtier who came to demand the prisoners! And how still more effectual is that he gives the king for persisting in his demand: where he seems to be under a spell, a fascination of rage and scorn; nothing can check him, he cannot check himself, because, besides the boundings of a most turbulent and impetuous nature, he has always had his own way, having from his boyhood held the post of a feudal war-chief: whatsoever thought touches him, it forthwith kindles into an overmastering passion that bears down all before it: irascible, headstrong, impatient, every effort to arrest or divert him only produces a new impatience; and we have "the uncontrollable rush of an energetic mind, surrendering itself to impulses impossible to be guided by will or circumstance, and sweeping into its own torrent whatsoever barriers of prudence feebler natures would oppose to it." We see that he has a rough and passionate soul, great strength and elevation of mind, with little gentleness and less delicacy, and "a force of will that rises into poetry by its own chafings;" -that when he once gets thoroughly started, nothing can stop him but exhaustion; and that when this comes "the passion of talk is ready to become the passion of action." "Speaking thick" is elsewhere set down as one of his peculiarities; and it seems doubtful whether the Poet took

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this from some tradition concerning him, or considered it a natural result of his prodigious rush and press of thought.

Hotspur's untamed boisterousness of tongue has perhaps its best setting forth in the scene at Bangor between him and Glendower. Here one hardly knows which to admire most, his wit or his impudence. He finally stops the mouth of his antagonist, or heads him off upon another subject; as he does again shortly after in a dispute about the partitioning of the realm; and he does it not so much by force of reason as of will and speech. His contempt of poetry is highly characteristic; though it is observable that he has spoken more poetry than any other person in the play. But poetry is altogether an impulse with him, not a purpose, as it is with Glendower; and he loses all thought of himself and of his speech in the intensity of passion with which he contemplates the object or occasion that moves him. His celebrated description of the fight between Glendower and Mortimer has been censured as offending good taste by its extravagance. Perhaps, indeed, it were not in good taste to put such a strain into the mouth of a contemplative sage, like Prospero; but in Hotspur its very extravagance is in good taste, because hugely character

istic.

Another consequence, apparently, of Hotspur's having so much of passion in his head, is the singular absence of mind so well described by Prince Henry, and so finely exemplified in the scene with his wife; where, after she has closed her noble strain of womanly eloquence, he calls in a servant, makes several inquiries about his horse and orders him to be brought into the park, hears her reproof, exchanges some questions with her, and fights a battle in imagination, before he answers her tender remonstrance. Here it is plain that his absence is not from any lack of strength, but from a certain rapidity and skittishness of mind: he has not the control of his thinking; the issues of his brain being so conceived in fire as to preclude steadiness of attention and the pauses of thought: that which strikes

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his mind last must pop out first; and, in a word, he is rather possessed by his thoughts, than possessing them.

The qualities we have remarked must needs in a great measure unfit Hotspur for a military leader in regular warfare; the whole working of his nature being too impulsive and heady for the counterpoise of so weighty an undertaking. Too impetuous and eager for the contest to concert operations; too impatient for the end to await the adjustment of means; abundantly able to fight battles, but not to scheme them; he is qualified to succeed only in the hurly-burly of border warfare, where success comes more by fury of onset than by wisdom of plan. All which is finely shown just before the battle of Shrewsbury, where if he be not perversely wrong-headed, he is so headstrong, peremptory, and confident even to rashness, as to render him quite impracticable: we see, and his fellow-chieftains see, that there is no coming to a temper with him; that he will be sure to fall out and quarrel with whoever stands out from or against his purposes. Yet he nowhere appears more truly the noble Hotspur than on this occasion, when amidst the falling off of friends, the backwardness of allies, and the thickening of dangers, his ardent and brave spirit turns his very disadvantages into sources of confidence.

Hotspur is a general favorite: whether from something in himself, or from the injuries he has suffered at the hands of the king, he has our good will from the first: we can scarce choose but wish him success; nor is it without some reluctance that we set the prince above him in our regards. Which may be owing in part to the interest we take, and justly, in his wife, who, timid, solicitous, affectionate, playful, is a woman of the true Shakespearean stamp, and such as we shall find delineated nowhere else. Nothing can well surpass, in its way, the harmony which we feel to be between her prying inquisitive gentleness, and his rough, stormy courage; for in her gentleness there is much strength, and his bravery is not without gentleness. scene at Warkworth, where they first appear together, is a

The