diminution of sympathy and fervor is to be expected when John, who has uttered to Cardinal Pandulph the memorable vaunt,

That no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions, afterwards surrenders into his hand the circle of his glory,-otherwise his crown. Of all Shakespeare's kings, he is, moreover, the only one who is hopelessly abject. The one thing that can be urged in his favor is that Faulconbridge retains his devotion, which may be to the crown to which by birth he is so near rather than to its wearer, and also seems to believe that John may still

Away; and glister like the god of war. For John's shortcomings Faulconbridge makes ample amends. In no other character in Shakespeare is the turbulent, buoyant, and martial spirit of Englishmen so finely and fully illustrated, and in none do the reckless daring and devilry of the most loyal and patriotic of warriors find so passionate and vehement utterance. It needs no tearing of the lion's skin from the shoulders of the recreant Austria to prove the bastard of royal race. What is almost regal responsibility lights his brows from the moment he is trusted with the control of John's battle. In spite of his temporary acquiescence in John's instructiens to murder Arthur, IIubert speaks on every occasion like a brave man, whom the exalted rank of noblemen, such as Salisbury, Norfolk, and Pembroke, cannot cow.

Every speech assigned him shows firm resolve, unalterable courage, and overpowering patriotism. To him, too, is assigned the closing speech, perhaps the most characteristically national utterance in the play.

There remains the character of Prince Arthur. Shakespeare has presented him as some years younger than his real age, adding thus to the pathos of what are perhaps the most harrowing scenes he has written. Never was any appeal so melting, so irresistible, as the words he addresses to Hubert. Criticism, principally of the German school, has dwelt upon

the frivolous inquiry whether Arthur was capable of responding with adequate warmth to the frenzied devotion and adoration of Constance, as though the heartrending words of the prince upon his capture by his uncle did not place the fact beyond question,

O, this will make my mother die with grief.

Other criticism or exegesis has shown how far the action of the play casts a light upon feudal custom in England, and one Danish writer of intelligence holds rather prosaically that "Arthur's entreaties to the rugged Hubert to spare his eyes must have represented in

Shakespeare's thought the prayers of his little Hamnet to be suffered still to see the light of day, or rather Shakespeare's appeal to Death to spare the child, prayers and appeals which were all in vain."

The English earls, Pandulph, the French King, and the Dauphin are drawn with a firm hand, and the mourning queens recall naturally those in Richard III. A keen debate has been maintained as to the share which ambition has in the defeat of Constance. This imports

no

more than does the question how far in King John Shakespeare appealed to the Protestant sympathies of his own time. The spirit by which King John is animated is distinctly Protestant. So free is it from the rancor which pervades The Troublesome Raigne that some excuse seems furnished for the opinion, more than once expressed, that Shakespeare gives proof of Catholic leanings.

What, however, is regarded as Catholicism may probably be accepted as indifferentism a sort of "a plague on both your houses." The style in the versification has much in common with that of Richard. There are many rimed passages. Full mastery had not been acquired of the blank verse, the highest poctic medium of which the English language is capable, and the separate lines are, as a rule, perfect and self-contained. This is specially noticeable in the address of the men of Angiers concerning the proposed marriage between the Dauphin and Blanch of Spain.

VOL. CVII

T'

HE play of Romeo and Juliet is like a piece of music, and it is the music which all true lovers have heard in the air since they began listening to one another's voice. Here, for once, youth becomes conscious of itself, and of the charm which is passing out of the world with its passing. A young man wrote this wise and passionate eulogy of youth; and it is that contemporaneous heat of blood in it which has kept the names of these two young lovers alive in men's minds as the perfect exemplars of unspoiled love. Love in youth is an emotion that may well seem exaggerated "to animals that do not love"; and if the passion of Romeo and Juliet is at times as clamorous as Italian love in Italian operas, that leaves it perhaps all the more like the thing which it renders so frankly. In Ferdinand and Miranda, in Perdita and Florizel, there is a more subtly human poetry than in Romeo or Juliet; only we remember that for its poetry, while we remember this as if it were love itself.

Compared with one of Shakespeare's later women, with Imogen, for instance, Juliet is but a sketch; she lives, but only in her love: as Romeo, indeed, but for his love, is any hasty and ardent youth out of whom passion strikes un

looked-for sparks of imagination. But it is precisely by this concentration upon the development and consequences of one impulse, irresistible and yet ineffectual, that Shakespeare has given us, not this or that adorable person who, among other things, loves, but two lovers who, besides loving, just remember to live. They have but one desire, and this they attain; so that they must be said to have succeeded in life. But they have no force over circumstances; they bend to their will only the consent of a few hours.

In Antony and Cleopatra, in which we see the other side of love, played out before the world on the stage of the world, the two eager and calculating lovers have the larger part of a lifetime given to them to love and hate in. This play, as Coleridge has noted, "should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet." It is indeed in these two plays that Shakespeare expounds the whole art of love. It may be that he has left something over; for there is another garden besides Juliet's in which Sakuntala walked; and Isolde, in Wagner's music, has added a cry to "the desire of the woman for the desire of the man." But the whole art, certainly, is in those two plays. Romeo and Juliet is the breviary of lovers who have loved young and at first sight.