Edward's smart reply to the king, or of his assassination by any body; and that there is not even the report of one who lived near to the time, of the participation of either of the king's brothers in the assassination, if it occurred. There is little in reason for believing any part of the story, though there is not—as there seldom can be any proof of the negative.

I have already noticed the anachronisms of Shakspeare, dependant upon the ages of his heroes. His Richard calls the prince scornfully, brat; the prince was just one year younger than Gloucester; the one was then about nineteen, and the other eighteen years of age.

The presence of Margaret, at her son's examination and death, are dramatic incidents; as in Gloucester's attempt to murder her. She was taken, kept prisoner for five years, and then ransomed by Louis IX.*

We have now Richard's crime the second, -the murder of King Henry in the Tower. The address of the unhappy king to Gloucester, which is but slightly altered from the old play, exhibits, I think, evident traces of Shakspeare's hand :

"Hadst thou been kill'd when first thou didst presume,

Thou hadst not lived to kill a son of mine.

And thus I prophecy that many a thousand,
Which now mistrust no parcel of my fear,

And many an old man's sigh, and many a widow's,
And many an orphan's water-standing eye,

Men for their sons, wives for their husbands' fate,
And orphans for their parents' timeless death,
Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born.
The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign;

The night-crow cried, boding luckless time;

Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempests shook down trees ;
The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top,

And chattering pies in dismal discord sung.

Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain,

And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope :

To wit, an indigest deformed lump,

Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.

Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,

To signify thou cam'st to bite the world."

And so does Gloucester's soliloquy, in which he traces the deformity of his mind to that of his body :

"Then, since the heavens have shap'd my body so,

Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.

I have no brother-I am like no brother;

And this word love which grey-beards call divine,
Be resident in them like one another,

And not in me,-I am myself alone!"

As to this murder, Shakspeare is justified by Holinshed, who, however, contrary to what we have just heard, makes Richard a very zealous brother, willing to imbrue his hands in blood, for his brother's sake:

"Poor king Henry the Sixth, a little before deprived (as we have heard), of his realm and imperial crown, was now in the Tower, despoiled of his life by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, (as the constant fame ran,) who (to the intent that his brother Edward might reign in more surety) murdered the King and Henry with a dagger."†

Going back to Fabyan, we find, that upon Ascension eve the corpse of Henry VI. was exposed to public view in London:

*

Lingard, 214. ↑ Hol., 324, from Hall, who copies from Polydore Vergil, p. 531.

"Of the death of this prince, divers tales were told, but the most common fame went, that he was sticked with a dagger by the hands of the Duke of Gloucester."*

The Croyland Continuation is very mysterious :

"I forbear to say that at this time, the body of Henry the Sixth was found lifeless in the Tower of London. May God forgive, and afford time for repentance to him, whoever he may be, who dared to lay sacrilegious hands upon the anointed of the Lord! Hence the doer may obtain the name of a tyrant, the sufferer of a glorious martyr."+

The Yorkist manuscript after mentions the death of the prince, and the total discomfiture of the Lancastrians:

"The calamity of all which came to the knowledge of the said Henry, late called king, being then in the Tower of London; not having, afore this, knowledge of the said matters, he took it to so great despite, ire, and indignation, that of pure displeasure and melancholy, he died the 23rd day of the month of May."+

The Leland Chronicler goes nearer to the point :

"A none after came King Edward to London, with three thousand men. And the same night, being the 21st day of May, and Tuesday, at night, betwixt eleven and twelve of the clock, was King Henry, being prisoner in the Tower, put to death; the Duke of Gloucester and divers others being there that night."S

This passage contains the only approach to credence of a fact, but the evidence is very weak, and the fact affords no proof of the murder. I quite agree with Walpole as to the improbability of Richard's becoming the murderer of the captive and childless king. On the other hand, it is sufficiently clear, that, from the very first, it was suspected that Henry was murdered, and that the perpetrator was in station so high as to be called a tyrant, and that a rumour was prevalent at an early period, but perhaps not until after Richard's death, that Gloucester was the murderer.

The closing scene, in which the king, queen, and royal brothers, with the infant prince, appear in domestic harmony (dissimulated, of course, on the part of Richard), is necessarily the poet's. On this occasion, Edward recapitulates the foemen who have been destroyed in

the war:

"Three dukes of Somerset,|| threefold renown'd
For hardy and undoubted champions;

Two Clifford's,¶ as the father and the son;

And two Northumberlands ;** two braver men

+ P. 556.

* P. 662. + P. 38, 47. § Leland, ii. 507. I have necessarily gone over the same ground with others, and my quotations are nearly the same as those of Mr. Bruce, the editor of the Camden M.S. I subjoin his note. "The contradiction between the date of the exposition of the corpse, as related by the Leland Chronicler, who is a very good authority, and by Fabyan, who is generally pretty accurate respecting matters which took place in London, and the date of the death as given by the author, now published, if considered with reference to the position of the various persons interested in Henry's death on those days, and the circumstances of his hurried interment, will be found, to the destruction of the credit of our author's version, of what was in all probability an infa. mous murder."-p. 47.

|| Edmund, slain at St. Alban's; Heury, beheaded at Hexham; Edmund, beheaded at Tewksbury. Thomas, killed at St. Alban's; John, killed at Towton. ** Henry (son of Hotspur), slain at St. Alban's; another Henry, at Towton.

Ne'er spurr'd their coursers at the trumpet's sound:
With them the two brave bears, Warwick and Montagu,
That in their chains fetter'd the kingly lion,

And made the forest tremble when they roar'd."

Dr. Johnson, who ascribes all the three plays to Shakspeare, says of hem

"These plays, considered without regard to characters and incidents, merely as narrations in verse, are more happily conceived, and more accurately finished, than those of King John, Richard II., or the tragic scenes of King Henry IV. and V. . . Of these three plays, I think the second the best. The truth is, that they have not sufficient variety of action, for the incidents are too often of the same kind; yet many of the characters are well discriminated. King Henry and his queen, King Edward, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Earl of Warwick, are very strongly and distinctly painted."

I do not agree with Johnson in ascribing to these pieces any one point of superiority over the former historical plays. On the contrary, the second, though, as he says, the best of the three, is inferior, in my opinion, in good scenes and speeches, to the second part of Henry IV., which is the least admirable of those other plays. Comparisons, however, of works, are as difficult as they are odious as to persons.

The character of Henry VI. is correctly and consistently drawn. Malcolm Laing wrongs this prince, when he says that it was "because he was a fool, that he was reputed a saint."* He was certainly deficient in the energy that was required in the holder of a disputed throne, and was more calculated for a private life or for a cloister, than for a palace. Such is he described by contemporaries,† and such has Shakspeare well painted him. Even the exception which I have noticed, to his usual submissiveness, in his peremptory refusal to hear excuses for Suffolk, may be traced to the religious respect which he paid to an oath. The character of Edward is as clearly marked as history allows. In the period of the play, he could only be known as a brave soldier, with the habits and notions of a libertine. Warwick appears, very properly, as a brave, able, proud, and ambitious nobleman, as he unquestionably was. As Richard has a play to himself, his much-disputed character will be considered hereafter; but, although Margaret also reappears in that play, it is to these that she properly belongs; especially since Mrs. Jameson is of opinion that the character of this woman is of itself sufficient to prove that the play was not originally designed by Shakspeare. She is, however, of an equally decided opinion, that there are passages in the second and fifth parts which Shakspeare alone could have written. Though I agree with this lady, that Shakspeare

Henry's Great Brit., xii. 399.

+ See particularly Blackman, in Otterbourne, 287. Holinshed says, "He was of a seemly stature, of body slender, to which proportion all other members were answerable; his face beautiful, wherein continually was resident the bounty of mind with the which he was inwardly endued. Of his own natural inclination, he abhorred all the vices as well of the body as of the soul. His patience was such, that of all the injuries to him done, (which were innumerable,) he never asked vengeance, thinking that for such adversity as chanced to him his sins should be forgotten and forgiven. What losses so ever happened to him he never esteemed, nor made any account thereof; but, if any thing were done that might sound as an offence towards God, he sore lamented, and, with great repentance, sorrowed for it.”—iii, 324.

No. ccxvi. 505.

did not write the original play, and that he did write or retouch many passages in it, so as to produce the play that we have, I cannot feel that there is any thing in the character of Margaret that Shakspeare might not have conceived. "He excites," she says, 66 our respect and sympathy even for a Lady Macbeth, and would never have given us a heroine without a touch of heroism," or "left her without a single personal quality which would excite our interest in her bravely-endured misfortunes."

Now, Johnson says, that "Lady Macbeth is merely detested:" and I suspect that, if she does excite an admiration, which her crimes do not deserve, it is owing to the splendid acting which she has occasioned, especially with those of us who remember Siddons. But, surely, Lady Macbeth has less right than Margaret to be deemed heroic, who braved all dangers in defence of her crown, husband, and son. Nor is there any personal quality in which the Scottish exceeds the French woman. That the character of Lady Macbeth is the more poetical conception, I readily admit; and, perhaps, Mrs. Jameson has a fair right to say that it is so because it is Shakspeare's own; whereas, in the other case, he had no part but that of amplifying and improving the speeches which a former dramatist had assigned to her. Yet I confess, that if there were not other grounds for ascribing the original play to another hand, I should not deem the character of Margaret impossible to be drawn by Shakspeare.

I am not of opinion that any convincing argument, on one side or the other, as to the authorship of these plays, is to be drawn from the comparison with history. Mrs. Jameson has noticed his deviations from history injurious to Margaret, her love for Suffolk, and her too ready reconciliation with Warwick. These Shakspeare found in the old play.

I believe that in adopting the works of dramatists, he took little pains except with the language and versification. In amplifying a speech he did not often introduce new ideas, but he enlarged, and clothed in more correct language and more stately verse, those which he found prepared. It is chiefly because I cannot think that the language of the "Contention" was Shakspeare's, that I concur with Malone and Mrs. Jameson in ascribing it to another. The language of the first part, as it stands among Shakspeare's works, is inferior to that of the corrected plays, but it is much better than that of the uncorrected. It may therefore be presumed, either that it was the entire work of a writer, ranking in merit between Shakspeare and the author of the Contention, or that Shakspeare was unusually careless and hasty in correcting it. I give these opinions with real diffidence, and with an admission of ignorance of some of the circumstances which ought to affect them.

Bosw., xi. 276.

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRISTRAM DUMPS, ESQ.*

CHAP. V.

THE adventure related in the preceding chapter was one of which I did not feel proud, and therefore did not mention it to any one. Thanks to the comparative privacy of what one may call newspaper life in France, I was not publicly shown up the next morning under an article headed" Police Extraordinary," nor had my name to run the gauntlet of a dozen paragraphs, concocted by the penny-a-line "gentlemen of the press" for the London prints-thence to be transferred to the sooty chronicles of Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and Leeds; and finally shot in the last beams of its éclat to Land's End or Johnny Groat's house in the pages of the Western Luminary, or of the Northern Star.

Nevertheless, with that guilty consciousness which, although the affair was no fault of mine, would never permit me to dismiss a sense of the ridiculous in all that had occurred, I imagined symptoms of discovery in every face that approached me. I thought the waiter put on my dinner with a particular smirk—and that as I went down stairs, the master of the hotel made me a different-a sort of patronising, laughin-the-sleeve kind of bow-but particularly did I think that the face of Frank Delaroue, which always expanded into an arch expression when he saw me, betrayed on this occasion a double charge of suppressed drollery. In this I was mistaken; but, nevertheless, was destined "fra breve," as the Italians say, before the lapse of many days-to give him a similar opportunity of entertainment, and an incident occurred which contributed greatly to increase the familiarity of our acquaintance.

After having been kept in the house the whole of the morning by rain, I took a sudden fancy, from mere weariness of spirit, to go to the Opera Comique. I always go to those sort of places early; so having ordered my dinner a little before the usual time, and having despatched it with much more alacrity than usual-with the air of one who has something new in hand, I looked almost impatiently at the dessert as the waiter was putting it on-the rogue guessed the reason immediately.

"Peut être que Monsieur va au spectacle ce soir-mais il y a du temps," added he, throwing up his hand with the usual gesture. I unluckily, therefore, trusted to his watch instead of my own, and on arriving at the door of the theatre, found myself, by the crowd already collected, later than I had intended. It is the custom in France, and an admirable one it is, for the expectants at a theatre to range themselves two and two in a file along the passage of the entrance to which they aspire. There they stand, and when the time comes, proceed with the order and regularity of soldiers to the pay-box and entrance-no one ever thinking of stepping out of his place, or of trying to give another the go-by. Few persons can duly appreciate this, who have not had a squeeze into an English theatre, but more especially into the pit of the Opera-House on the night of some favourite performance. To wait a

• Continued from vol. liv., p. 367.