“I am the last of noble Edward’s sons,
    Of whom thy father, Prince of Wales, was first: 
    In war was never lion rag’d more fierce,
    In peace was never gentle lamb more mild,
    Than was that young and princely gentleman. 
    His face thou hast, for even so look’d he,
    Accomplish’d with the number of thy hours;
    But when he frown’d, it was against the French,
    And not against his friends:  his noble hand
    Did win what he did spend, and not spend that
    Which his triumphant father’s hand had won: 
    His hands were guilty of no kindred’s blood,
    But bloody with the enemies of his kin.”

No one, I think, can help feeling that this is the style of a man rather aiming at finely-turned phrases than deeply in earnest with the matter in hand; more the language of brilliant rhetoric than of impassioned thought.  At all events, there is to my taste an air of falsetto about it; it seems more like the image of a painted than of a living passion.  Be this as it may, the Poet’s own riper style quite discredits it; though I have to confess that, but for his teachings, we might not so well have known of any thing better.  Now contrast with the foregoing one of the hero’s speeches in Coriolanus, iii. 2, where his mother urges him to play the demagogue, and practise smiles for the gaining of votes: 

    “Away, my disposition, and possess me
    Some harlot’s spirit! my throat of war be turn’d—­
    Which quired with my drum—­into a pipe
    Small as an eunuch’s, or the virgin voice
    That babies lulls asleep! the smiles of knaves
    Tent in my cheeks; and school-boys’ tears take up
    The glasses of my sight! a beggar’s tongue
    Make motion through my lips; and my arm’d knees,
    Who bow’d but in my stirrup, bend like his
    That hath receiv’d an alms!—­I will not do’t;
    Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,
    And by my body’s action teach my mind
    A most inherent baseness.”

Perhaps the Poet’s different styles might be still better exemplified in passages of pathos; but here I must rest with merely referring, for instance, to York’s speech in King Richard the Second, beginning, “As in a theatre the eyes of men,” and the passage in Macbeth where Macduff first learns of the slaughter of his wife and children.  Both are indeed very noble in their way; but I think no reader of disciplined taste can fail to see the vast superiority of the latter, and that this is owing not so much to any difference of character in the speakers as to a far higher stage of art in the Poet.  I must add that the rhetorical or speech-making style appears more or less in all the plays of his first period:  we find something of it even in such high specimens as The Merchant of Venice and King Henry the Fourth.