The verses intervening are smooth, simple, and passably well worded; indeed the force of elegant commonplace cannot well go further than in such lines as these.

   Thyself art bruised and bent with many broils,
   And stratagems forepast with iron pens
   Are texed {271} in thine honourable face;
   Thou art a married man in this distress,
   But danger woos me as a blushing maid;
   Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

Audley.  To die is all as common as to live; The one in choice, the other holds in chase; For from the instant we begin to live We do pursue and hunt the time to die:  First bud we, then we blow, and after seed; Then presently we fall; and as a shade Follows the body, so we follow death.  If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?  If we fear it, why do we follow it?

(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of response from an Irish echo—­“Because we can’t help.”)

If we do fear, with fear we do but aid
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner;
If we fear not, then no resolved proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate: 

and so forth.  Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a passage in the transcendant central scenes of Measure for Measure: 

            Merely, thou art death’s fool;
   For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
   And yet runn’st toward him still;

and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blown by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic trumpet.  Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.

The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special analysis and affords no necessary extract.  We may just observe as examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog

   Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,
   And made at noon a night unnatural
   Upon the quaking and dismayed world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury, and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. A tout seigneur tout honneur; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified in the person of Prince Charles.

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so inadequately “staged to the show,” I can only say that if any reader believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before all men’s eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die in that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators.