o fact, it is another side of kingship which he has made prominent in
his English histories. The irony [186] of kingship--average human
nature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic effect into the vortex of
great events; tragedy of everyday quality heightened in degree only by
the conspicuous scene which does but make those who play their parts
there conspicuously unfortunate; the utterance of common humanity
straight from the heart, but refined like other common things for
kingly uses by Shakespeare's unfailing eloquence: such, unconsciously
for the most part, though palpably enough to the careful reader, is the
conception under which Shakespeare has arranged the lights and shadows
of the story of the English kings, emphasising merely the light and
shadow inherent in it, and keeping very close to the original
authorities, not simply in the general outline of these dramatic
histories but sometimes in their very expression. Certainly the
history itself, as he found it in Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, those
somewhat picturesque old chroniclers who had themselves an eye for the
dramatic "effects" of human life, has much of this sentiment already
about it. What he did not find there was the natural prerogative--such
justification, in kingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, of
the exceptional position, as makes it practicable in the result. It is
no Henriade he writes, and no history of the English people, but the
sad fortunes of some English kings as conspicuous examples of the
ordinary human condition. As in a children's [187] story, all princes
are in extremes. Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into which
chance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhat more
touchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm. Such is
the motive that gives unity to these unequal and intermittent
contributions toward a slowly evolved dramatic chronicle, which it
would have taken many days to rehearse; a not distant story from real
life still well remembered in its general course, to which people might
listen now and again, as long as they cared, finding human nature at
least wherever their attention struck ground in it.

He begins with John, and allows indeed to the first of these English
kings a kind of greatness, making the development of the play centre in
the counteraction of his natural gifts--that something of heroic force
about him--by a madness which takes the shape of reckless impiety,