an ague’s fit,
     And so he’ll die; and rising so again,
     When I shall meet him in the court of heav’n,
     I shall not know him; therefore never, never
     Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.

   K. Philip.  You are as fond of grief as of your child.

   Constance.  Grief fills the room up of my absent child: 
     Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me;
     Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
     Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
     Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. 
     Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

The contrast between the mild resignation of Queen Katherine to her own wrongs, and the wild, uncontrollable affliction of Constance for the wrongs which she sustains as a mother, is no less naturally conceived than it is ably sustained throughout these two wonderful characters.

The accompaniment of the comic character of the Bastard was well chosen to relieve the poignant agony of suffering, and the cold, cowardly policy of behaviour in the principal characters of this play.  Its spirit, invention, volubility of tongue, and forwardness in action, are unbounded.  Aliquando sufflaminandus erat, says Ben Jonson of Shakespeare.  But we should be sorry it Ben Jonson had been his licenser.  We prefer the heedless magnanimity of his wit infinitely to all Jonson’s laborious caution.  The character of the Bastard’s comic humour is the same in essence as that of other comic characters in Shakespeare; they always run on with good things and are never exhausted; they are always daring and successful.  They have words at will and a flow of wit, like a flow of animal spirits.  The difference between Falconbridge and the others is that he is a soldier, and brings his wit to bear upon action, is courageous with his sword as well as tongue, and stimulates his gallantry by his jokes, his enemies feeling the sharpness of his blows and the sting of his sarcasms at the same time.  Among his happiest sallies are his descanting on the composition of his own person, his invective against ‘commodity, tickling commodity’, and his expression of contempt for the Archduke of Austria, who had killed his father, which begins in jest but ends in serious earnest.  His conduct at the siege of Angiers shows that his resources were not confined to verbal retorts.—­The same exposure of the policy of courts and camps, of kings, nobles, priests, and cardinals, takes place here as in the other plays we have gone through, and we shall not go into a disgusting repetition.

This, like the other plays taken from English history, is written in a remarkably smooth and flowing style, very different from some of the tragedies, Macbeth, for instance.  The passages consist of a series of single lines, not running into one another.  This peculiarity in the versification, which is most common in the three parts of Henry VI, has been assigned as a reason why those plays were not written by Shakespeare.  But the same structure of verse occurs in his other undoubted plays, as in Richard ii and in king John.  The following are instances: