his insensibility to all that his father and uncle urge to calm him, and his fine abstracted apostrophe to honour, ’By heaven methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honour from the moon,’ &c.  After all, notwithstanding the gallantry, generosity, good temper, and idle freaks of the mad-cap Prince of Wales, we should not have been sorry if Northumberland’s force had come up in time to decide the fate of the battle at Shrewsbury; at least, we always heartily sympathize with Lady Percy’s grief when she exclaims: 

     Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers,
     To-day might I (hanging on Hotspur’s neck)
     Have talked of Monmouth’s grave.

The truth is, that we never could forgive the Prince’s treatment of Falstaff; though perhaps Shakespeare knew what was best, according to the history, the nature of the times, and of the man.  We speak only as dramatic critics.  Whatever terror the French in those days might have of Henry V, yet to the readers of poetry at present, Falstaff is the better man of the two.  We think of him and quote him oftener.

HENRY V

Henry V is a very favourite monarch with the English nation, and he appears to have been also a favourite with Shakespeare, who labours hard to apologize for the actions of the king, by showing us the character of the man, as ‘the king of good fellows’.  He scarcely deserves this honour.  He was fond of war and low company:—­we know little else of him.  He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious—­idle, or doing mischief.  In private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life, which he subjected to a kind of regal license; in public affairs, he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal advice.  His principles did not change with his situation and professions.  His adventure on Gadshill was a prelude to the affair of Agincourt, only a bloodless one; Falstaff was a puny prompter of violence and outrage, compared with the pious and politic Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave the king carte blanche, in a genealogical tree of his family, to rob and murder in circles of latitude and longitude abroad—­to save the possessions of the Church at home.  This appears in the speeches in Shakespeare, where the hidden motives that actuate princes and their advisers in war and policy are better laid open than in speeches from the throne or woolsack.  Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbours.  Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France.  Because he did not know how to exercise the enormous power, which had just dropped into his hands, to any one good purpose, he immediately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of sovereignty) to do all the mischief he could.  Even if absolute monarchs had the wit to find out objects of laudable