We must suppose a long interval to have elapsed since Katherine's interview with the two cardinals. Wolsey was disgraced, and poor Anna Bullen at the height of her short lived prosperity. It was Wolsey's fate to be detested by both queens. In the pursuance of his own selfish and ambitious designs, he had treated both with perfidy; and one was the remote, the other the immediate cause of his ruin.*

The ruffian king, of whom one hates to think, was bent on forcing Katherine to concede her rights, and illegitimize her daughter, in favor of the offspring of Anna Bullen: she steadily refused, was declared contumacious, and the sentence of divorce pronounced in 1533. Such of her attendants as persisted in paying her the honours due to a queen were driven from her household; those who consented to serve her as princess-dowager she refused to admit into her presence; so Shakespeare's tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet, tender and pathetic; without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices; without the help of romantic circumstances; without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation, and without any throes of tumultuous misery."

I have already observed that, in judging of Shakespeare's characters as of persons we meet in real life, we are swayed unconsciously by our own habits and feelings, and our preference governed, more or less, by our individual prejudices or sympathies. Thus Dr. Johnson, who has not a word to bestow on Imogen, and who has treated poor Juliet as if she had been in truth "the very beadle to an amorous sigh," does full justice to the character of Katherine, because the logical turn of his mind, his vigorous intellect, and his austere integrity, enabled him to appreciate its peculiar beauties; and, accordingly, we find that he gives it, not only unqualified, but almost exclusive admiration: he goes so far as to assert that in this play the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katherine.

* It will be remembered that in early youth Anna Bullen was betrothed to Lord Henry Percy, who was passionately in love with her. Wolsey, to serve the king's purposes, broke off this match, and forced Percy into an unwilling marriage with Lady Mary Talbot. “The stout Earl of Northumberland," who arrested Wolsey at York, was this very Percy: he was chosen for his mission by the interference of Anna Bullen—a piece of vengeance truly feminine in its mixture of sentiment and spitefulness and every way characteristic of the individual woman.

that she remained unattended except by a few women, and her gentleman usher, Griffith. During the last eighteen months of her life she resided at Kimbolton. Her nephew, Charles V., had offered her an asylum and princely treatment; but Katherine, broken in heart and declining in health, was unwilling to drag the spectacle of her misery and degradation into a strange country: she pined in her loneliness, deprived of her daughter, receiving no consolation from the pope, and no redress from the emperor. Wounded pride, wronged affection, and a cankering jealousy of the woman preferred to her (which, though it never broke out into unseemly words, is enumerated as one of the causes of her death), at length wore out a feeble frame. "Thus," says the chronicle, "Queen Katherine fell into her last sickness; and though the king sent to comfort her through Chapuys, the emperor's ambassador, she grew worse and worse; and finding death now coming, she caused a maid attending on her to write to the king to this effect:

My most dear Lord, King, and Husband :— "The hour of my death now approaching, I cannot choose but, out of the love I bear advise you you, of your soul's health, which you ought to prefer before all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever; for which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles: but I forgive you all, and pray God to do so likewise; for the rest, I commend unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her, as I have heretofore desired. I must intreat you also to respect my maids, and give them in marriage, which is not much, they being but three, and all my other servants a year's pay besides their due, lest otherwise they be unprovided for: lastly, I make this vow, that mine. eyes desire you above all things.-Farewell !"*

*The king is said to have wept on reading this letter, and her body being interred at Peterbro', in the monastery, for honour of her memory

She also wrote another letter to the ambassador, desiring that he would remind the king of her dying request, and urge him to do her this last right.

What the historian relates, Shakespeare realizes. On the wonderful beauty of Katherine's closing scene we need not dwell, for that requires no illustration. In transferring the sentiments of her letter to her lips, Shakespeare has given them added grace, and pathos, and tenderness, without injuring their truth and simplicity: the feelings, and almost the manner of expression, are Katherine's own. The severe justice with which she draws the character of Wolsey is extremely characteristic; the benign candour with which she listens. to the praise of him "whom living she most hated," is not less How beautiful her religious enthusiasm!—the slumber which visits her pillow, as she listens to that sad music she called her knell; her awakening from the vision of celestial joy to find herself still on earth—

SO.

Spirits of peace! where are ye? Are ye all gone,
And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?—

how unspeakably beautiful! And to consummate all in one final touch of truth and nature, we see that consciousness of her own worth and integrity which had sustained her through all her trials of heart, and that pride of station for which she had contended through long years,—which had become more dear by opposition, and by the perseverance with which she had asserted it,-remaining the last strong feeling upon her mind, to the very last hour of existence.

When I am dead, good wench,

Let me be used with honour: strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know

I was a chaste wife to my grave; embalm me,
Then lay me forth: although unqueen'd, yet like
A queen, and daughter to a king, inter me.

I can no more.

it was preserved at the dissolution, and erected into a bishop's see.Herbert's Life of Henry VIII.

In the epilogue to this play it is recommended

To the merciful construction of good women,

For such a one we shewed 'em :

alluding to the character of Queen Katherine. Shakespeare has, in fact, placed before us a queen and a heroine, who in the first place, and above all, is a good woman; and I repeat, that in doing so, and in trusting for all his effect to truth and virtue, he has given a sublime proof of his genius and his wisdom; for which, among many other obligations, we women remain his debtors.

[From Hazlitt's "Characters of Shakespear." *]

This play contains little action or violence of passion, yet it has considerable interest of a more mild and thoughtful cast, and some of the most striking passages in the author's works. The character of Queen Katherine is the most perfect delineation of matronly dignity, sweetness, and resigna tion that can be conceived. Her appeals to the protection of the king, her remonstrances to the cardinals, her conver sations with her women, show a noble and generous spirit, accompanied with the utmost gentleness of nature. What can be more affecting than her answer to Campeius and Wol sey, who come to visit her as pretended friends?—

Nay, forsooth, my friends,

They that must weigh out my afflictions,

They that my trust must grow to, live not here;
They are, as all my other comforts, far hence,
In mine own country, lords."

Dr. Johnson observes of this play that "the meek sorrows and virtuous distress of Katherine have furnished some scenes which may be justly numbered among the greatest efforts of tragedy. But the genius of Shakespear comes in and goes out with Katherine. Every other part may be easily conceived and easily written." This is easily said; *W. Carew Hazlitt's ed. (London, 1870), p. 167 fol.

but, with all due deference to so great a reputed authority as that of Johnson, it is not true. For instance, the scene of Buckingham led to execution is one of the most affecting and natural in Shakespear, and to which there is hardly an approach in any other author. Again, the character of Wolsey, the description of his pride and fall, are inimitable, and have, besides their gorgeousness of effect, a pathos which only the genius of Shakespear could lend to the distresses of a proud, bad man, like Wolsey. There is a sort of childlike simplicity in the very helplessness of his situation, arising from the recollection of his past overbearing ambition. After the cutting sarcasms of his enemies on his disgrace, against which he bears up with a spirit conscious of his own superiority, he breaks out into that fine apostrophe, “ Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness!" etc. There is in this passage, as well as in the well-known dialogue with Cromwell which follows, something which stretches beyond commonplace; nor is the account which Griffith gives of Wolsey's death less Shakespearian; and the candour with which Queen Katherine listens to the praise of "him whom I most hated living," adds the last graceful finishing to her character.

[From Knight's Comments on the Play.*]

"I come no more to make you laugh; things now
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,
Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,
We now present."

This is the commencement of the most remarkable Prologue of the few which are attached to Shakspere's plays. It is, to our minds, a perfect exposition of the principle-upon which the poet worked in the construction of this drama. Believing, whatever weight of authority there may be for the contrary opinion, that the Henry VIII. was a new play in *Pictorial Edition of Shakspere: Histories, vol. ii., p. 394 foll.