But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice at the opening of the fifth act.  If in all the historical groundwork of this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa’s intercession for the burgesses of Calais.  We know how Shakespeare on the like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech supplied to him by North’s version of Amyot’s Plutarch. {273} With the text of Lord Berners before him, the author of King Edward III. has given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead.  Incredible as it may seem to readers of the historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous.  The whole scene is at all points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.

Here then I think we may finally draw bridle:  for the rest of the course is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act which deserves analysis or calls for commentary.  We have now examined the whole main body of the work with somewhat more than necessary care; and our conclusion is simply this:  that if any man of common reading, common modesty, common judgment, and common sense, can be found to maintain the theory of Shakespeare’s possible partnership in the composition of this play, such a man will assuredly admit that the only discernible or imaginable touches of his hand are very slight, very few, and very early.  For myself, I am and have always been perfectly satisfied with one single and simple piece of evidence that Shakespeare had not a finger in the concoction of King Edward III.  He was the author of King Henry V.

NOTE.

I was not surprised to hear that my essay on the historical play of King Edward III. had on its first appearance met in various quarters with assailants of various kinds.  There are some forms of attack to which no answer is possible for a man of any human self-respect but the lifelong silence of contemptuous disgust.  To such as these I will never condescend to advert or to allude further than by the remark now as it were forced from me, that never once in my life have I had or will I have recourse in self-defence either to the blackguard’s loaded bludgeon of personalities or to the dastard’s sheathed dagger of disguise.  I have reviled no man’s person:  I have outraged no man’s privacy.  When I have found myself misled either by imperfection of knowledge or of memory, or by too much confidence in a generally