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