very great; and in a few days the English forces were visited by a frightful dysentery. Many of the most eminent leaders fell before its ravages. This was, probably, to be attributed to the position of the invading army; for, according to Holinshed, those who "valiantly defended the siege, damming up the river that hath his course through the town, the water rose so high betwixt the king's camp, and the Duke of Clarence's camp, divided by the same river, that the Englishmen were constrained to withdraw their artillery from one side." The mines and the countermines of Fluellen are to be found in Holinshed. Harfleur surrendered on the 22nd of September, after a siege of thirty-six days. The previous negotiations between Henry and the governor of the town were conducted by commissioners. Shakspere, of course, dramatically brought his principal personage upon the scene, in the convention by which the town was surrendered. Holinshed, who in general has an eye for the picturesque, has no description of the gorgeous ceremony which accompanied the surrender; but such a description is found in the older narratives, which represent the king upon his royal throne, placed under a pavilion at the top of the hill before the town, where his nobles and other principal persons, an illustrious body of men, were assembled in numbers, in their best equipments; his crowned triumphal helmet being held on his right hand upon a halbert-staff, by Sir Gilbert Umfreville." (Cotton MS.) The account of the loss which the English army sustained, during the thirty-six days subsequent to its landing, would be almost incredible, if its accuracy were not supported by every conflicting testimony. It appears, that if Henry landed with thirty thousand men, more than two-thirds must, during the short period of the siege, have been slain, have died of disease, or have been sent back to England as incapable of proceeding. The English army, when it quitted Harfleur, did not amount to much more than eight thousand fighting men.

The magnificent Chorus of this Act presents such a vivid picture of the circumstances that marked the eve of the battle of Agincourt, that even if they were not, for the most part, supported by authentic history, it would be impossible to dispos sess ourselves of the belief that they were true. "The French," according to Holinshed, "were very merry, pleasant, and full of game"-"the English made peace with God in confessing their sins."-Holinshed also mentions the French playing at dice for the English prisoners. But the narratives of Monstrelet and of St. Remy are much more minute than Holinshed; and in one or two small particulars they differ from that of the poet.

It is unnecessary for us to follow the Chroniclers, or the more minute contemporary historians, through their details of the fearful carnage and victory of Agincourt. We may, however, put the facts shortly before our readers, as they may be collected from Sir H. Nicolas's elaborate and careful history of the battle :

The fighting men of France wore "long coats of steel, reaching to their knees, which were very heavy; below these was armour for their legs; and above, white harness, and bacinets, with camails." They were drawn up between two woods, in a space wholly inadequate for the movements of such an immense body; and the ground was soft from heavy rains. It was with the utmost difficulty they could stand or lift their weapons. The horses at every step sunk into the mud. Henry formed his little band in one line, the archers being posted between the wings, in the form of a wedge, with sharp stakes fixed before them. The king, habited in his "cote d'armes," mounted a small gray horse; but he subsequently fought on foot. He addressed his troops with his usual spirit. Each army remained inactive for some hours. A truce was at length proposed by the French. The reply of Henry, before an army ten times as great as his own, differed little from the terms he had offered in his own capital. Towards the middle of the day the order was given to the English to advance, by Henry crying aloud, "Advance banners." Sir Thomas de Erpyngham, the commander of the archers, threw his truncheon into the air, exclaiming, "Now strike!" The English immediately prostrated themselves to the ground, beseeching the protection of Heaven, and proceeded in three lines on the French army. The archers of Henry soon put the French cavalry in disorder: and the whole army rushing on, with the national huzza, the archers threw aside their bows, and slew all before them with their billhooks and hatchets. The immense number of the French proved their ruin. The battle soon became a slaughter; and the harnessed knights, almost incapable of moving, were hacked to pieces by the English archers, "who were habited in jackets, and had their hosen loose, with hatchets or swords hanging from their girdles, whilst many were barefooted and without hats." The battle lasted about three hours. The English "stood on the heaps of corpses, which exceeded a man's height;" the French, indeed, fell almost passive in their lines. Henry, at one period of the battle, issued an order for the slaughter of his prisoners. Even the French writers justify this horrible circumstance, as an act of self-preservation. The total loss of the French was about ten thousand slain on the field; that of the English appears to have been about twelve hun

dred. Most of the dead were afterwards buried in enormous trenches.

The English king conducted himself with his accustomed dignity to his many illustrious prisoners. The victorious army marched to Calais in fine order, and embarked for England, without any attempt to follow up their almost miraculous triumph. Henry reached Calais on the 29th of October, and on the 17th of November landed at Dover. He entered London amidst the most expensive pageantry of the citizens, contrasting with the studied simplicity of his own retinue and demeanor, on Saturday the 24th of November.

KING HENRY VI.

PARTS I. II. III.

In the humble house of Shakspere's boyhood there was, in all probability, to be found a thick squat folio volume, then some thirty years printed, in which might be read, "what misery, what murder, and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the division and dissension of the renowned houses of Lancaster and York." This book was 'Hall's Chronicle.' With the local and family associations that must have belonged to his early years, the subject of the four dramas that relate to the dissension of the houses of Lancaster and York, or rather the subject of this one great drama in four parts, must have irresistibly presented itself to the mind of Shakspere, as one which he was especially qualified to throw into the form of a chronicle history. It was a task peculiarly fitted for the young poet during the first five years of his connection with the theatre. Historical dramas, in the rudest form, presented unequalled attractions to the audiences who flocked to the rising stage. He had not here to invent a plot; or to aim at the unity of action, of time, and of place, which the more refined critics of his day held to be essential to tragedy. The form of a chronicle history might appear to require little beyond a poetical exposition of the most attractive facts of the real Chronicles. It is in this spirit, we think, that Shakspere approached the execution of the First Part of 'Henry VI.' It appears to us, also, that in that very early performance he in some degree held his genius in subordination to the necessity of executing his task rather with reference to the character of his audience and the general nature of his subject than for the fulfilment of his own aspirations as

a poet. There was before him one of two courses. He might have chosen, as the greater number of his contemporaries chose, to consider the dominions of poetry and of common sense to be far sundered; and, unconscious or doubtful of the force of simplicity, he might have resolved, with them, to substitute what would more unquestionably gratify a rude popular taste, the force of extravagance. On the other hand, it was open to him to transfer to the dramatic shape the spiritstirring recitals of the old chronicle writers; in whose narratives, and especially in that portion of them in which they make their characters speak, there is a manly and straighforward earnestness which in itself not seldom becomes poetical. Shakspere chose this latter course. When we begin to study the 'Henry VI.,' we find in the First Part that the action does not appear to progress to a catastrophe; that the author lingers about the details, as one who was called upon to exhibit an entire series of events rather than the most dramatic portions of them; there are the alternations of success and loss, and loss and success, till we somewhat doubt to which side to assign the victory. The characters are firmly drawn, but without any very subtle distinctions,-and their sentiments and actions appear occasionally inconsistent, or at any rate not guided by a determined purpose in the writer. But although the effect may be, to a certain extent, undramatic, there is impressed upon the whole performance a wonderful air of truth. Much of this must have resulted from the extraordinary quality of the poet's mind, which could tear off all the flimsy conventional disguises of individual character, and penetrate the real moving principle of events with a rare acuteness, and a rarer impartiality. In our view, that whole portion of the First Part of Henry VI.' which deals with the character and actions of Joan of Arc is a remarkable example of this power in Shakspere. He knew that, with all the influence of her supernatural pretension, this extraordinary woman could not have swayed the destinies of kingdoms, and moulded princes and warriors to her will, unless she had been a person of very rare natural endowments. She was represented by the Chro niclers as a mere virago, a bold and shameless trull, a monster, a witch;-because they adopted the vulgar view of her character, -the view, in truth, of those to whom she was opposed. They were rough soldiers, with all the virtues and all the vices of their age; the creatures of brute force; the champions, indeed, of chivalry, but with the brand upon them of all the selfish passions with which the highest deeds of chivalry were too invariably associated. The English Chroniclers, in all that regards the delineation of characters and manners, give us

abundant materials upon which we may form an estimate of actions, and motives, and instruments; but they do not show us the instruments moving in their own forms of vitality; they do not lay bare their motives; and hence we have no real key to their actions. Froissart is, perhaps, the only contemporary writer who gives us real portraits of the men of nail. But Shakspere marshalled them upon his stage, in all their rude might, their coarse ambition, their low jealousies, their factious hatreds,-mixed up with their thirst for glory, their indomitable courage, their warm friendships, their tender natural affections, their love of country. This is the truth which Shakspere substituted for the vague delineations of the old stage.

The action of the First Part of 'Henry VI.,' which is spread over the period from the accession of the infant king to his marriage, is twofold. Its chief action is the war in France, its secondary action is the progress of party discord in England. The scenes in which Talbot and Salisbury and Bedford are "raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence," possessed, as we know, a wondrous charm for the audiences of the early drama. The brave Talbot had "his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators." This we can readily understand; for the scene between John Talbot and his father, and the death scene of Talbot, in this play, possess a power unto which, we may venture to say, the audiences in 1592 had never before yielded up their tears. But it was not by poetical fervour alone that they were subdued. The exhibition of their "forefathers' valiant acts," in the rudest fashion, was to them, according to Nashe, a new source of the highest pleasure. In another passage Nashe says, "What a glorious thing it is to have King Henry V. represented on the stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing both him and the dolphin to swear fealty." This is the concluding scene of the coarse and unpoetical' Famous Victories.' The stage had thus early possession of the subject of Henry V. The continuation of that story, with reference only to the wars of France under the regent Bedford, had enough in it to furnish materials for a spirit-stirring drama of equal popularity. But the author of Henry VI.' carried his views beyond this point; and it is for this cause that he gives us a two-fold action. The principle upon which he worked rendered it essentially a drama to be continued. Taken in itself it is a drama without a catastrophe.

The entire conduct of the play of 'Henry VI.,' with reference to the issue of the war in France, is of a gloomy and