of noble blood and lavish of poor men’s lives—­cerdonibus timenda; and the curses under which her memory was buried were spared by the people to her father, Lamiarum caede madenti.  In any case, the humblest not less than the highest of the poets who wrote under the reign of his daughter found it safe to present him in a popular light before an audience of whose general prepossession in his favour William Shakespeare was no slower to take advantage than Samuel Rowley.

The two plays we have just discussed have one quality of style in common which has already been noted; that in them rhetoric is in excess of action or passion, and far in excess of poetry.  They are not as yet perfect examples of his second manner, though far ahead of his first stage in performance as in promise.  Compared with the full and living figure of Katherine or of Constance, the study of Margaret of Anjou is the mere sketch of a poet still in his pupilage:  John and Henry, Faulconbridge and Wolsey, are designs beyond reach of the hand which drew the second and third Richard without much background or dramatic perspective.  But the difficulties inherent in either subject are not surmounted throughout with absolute equality of success; the very point of appeal to the sympathy and excitement of the time may have been something of a disturbing force in the composition of the work—­a loadstone rock indeed, of tempting attraction to the patriot as well as to the playwright, but possibly capable of proving in some measure a rock of offence to the poet whose ship was piloted towards it.  His perfect triumph in the field of patriotic drama, coincident with the perfect maturity of his comic genius and his general style, has now to show itself.

The great national trilogy which is at once the flower of Shakespeare’s second period and the crown of his achievements in historic drama—­unless indeed we so far depart from the established order and arrangement of his works as to include his three Roman plays in the same class with these English histories—­offers perhaps the most singular example known to us of the variety in fortune which befell his works on their first appearance in print.  None of these had better luck in that line at starting than King Henry IV.; none had worse than King Henry V.  With Romeo and Juliet, the Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet, it shares the remarkable and undesirable honour of having been seized and boarded by pirates even before it had left the dockyard.  The masterbuilder’s hands had not yet put the craft into seaworthy condition when she was overhauled by these Kidds and Blackbeards of the press.  Of those four plays, the two tragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewritten from end to end:  the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first came from the poet’s hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modified and