ble, but demands no special
analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as
examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens
and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,
And made at noon a night unnatural
Upon the quaking and dismayed world.

The interest rises again with the reappearance and release of Salisbury,
and lifts the style for a moment to its own level. _A tout seigneur tout
honneur_; the author deserves some dole of moderate approbation for his
tribute to the national chivalry of a Frenchman as here exemplified in
the person of Prince Charles.

Of the two next scenes, in which the battle of Poitiers is so
inadequately "staged to the show," I can only say that if any reader
believes them to be the possible work of the same hand which set before
all men's eyes for all time the field of Agincourt, he will doubtless die
in that belief, and go to his own place in the limbo of commentators.

But a yet more flagrant effect of contrast is thrust upon our notice at
the opening of the fifth act. If in all the historical groundwork of
this play there is one point of attraction which we might have thought
certain to stimulate the utmost enterprise and evoke the utmost
capacities of an aspiring dramatist, it must surely be sought in the
crowning scene of the story; in the scene of Queen Philippa's
intercession for the burgesses of Calais. We know how Shakespeare on the
like occasion was wont to transmute into golden verse the silver speech
supplied to him by North's version of Amyot's Plutarch. {273} With the
text of Lord Berners before him, the author of _King Edward III_. has
given us for the gold of Froissart not even adulterated copper, but
unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the
historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by
dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all
the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his
incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at
once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all
points alike in its unlikeness to the workmanship of Shakespeare.

Here then I think we may finally draw bridle: for the rest of the course
is not worth running; there is nothing in the residue of this last act
which deserves analysis or c