ambition, they could only ‘plume up their wills’ in adhering to the more sacred formula of the royal prerogative, ’the right divine of kings to govern wrong’, because will is only then triumphant when it is opposed to the will of others, because the pride of power is only then shown, not when it consults the rights and interests of others, but when it insults and tramples on all justice and all humanity.  Henry declares his resolution ’when France is his, to bend it to his awe, or break it all to pieces’—­a resolution worthy of a conqueror, to destroy all that he cannot enslave; and what adds to the joke, he lays all the blame of the consequences of his ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny.  Such is the history of kingly power, from the beginning to the end of the world—­with this difference, that the object of war formerly, when the people adhered to their allegiance, was to depose kings; the object latterly, since the people swerved from their allegiance, has been to restore kings, and to make common cause against mankind.  The object of our late invasion and conquest of France was to restore the legitimate monarch, the descendant of Hugh Capet, to the throne:  Henry V in his time made war on and deposed the descendant of this very Hugh Capet, on the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate.  What would the great modern catspaw of legitimacy and restorer of divine right have said to the claim of Henry and the title of the descendants of Hugh Capet?  Henry V, it is true, was a hero, a king of England, and the conqueror of the king of France.  Yet we feel little love or admiration for him.  He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives:  he was a king of England, but not a constitutional one, and we only like kings according to the law; lastly, he was a conqueror of the French king, and for this we dislike him less than if he had conquered the French people.  How then do we like him?  We like him in the play.  There he is a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant.  As we like to gaze at a panther or a young lion in their cages in the Tower, and catch a pleasing horror from their glistening eyes, their velvet paws, and dreadless roar, so we take a very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical delight in the boasts and feats of our younger Harry, as they appear on the stage and are confined to lines of ten syllables; where no blood follows the stroke that wounds our ears, where no harvest bends beneath horses’ hoofs, no city flames, no little child is butchered, no dead men’s bodies are found piled on heaps and festering the next morning—­in the orchestra!

So much for the politics of this play; now for the poetry.  Perhaps one of the most striking images in all Shakespeare is that given of war in the first lines of the Prologue.