forced especially on men's attention by the terrible circumstances of
his end, in the delineation of which Shakespeare triumphs, setting,
with true poetic tact, this incident of the king's death, in all the
horror of a violent one, amid a scene delicately suggestive of what is
perennially peaceful and genial in the outward world. Like the sensual
humours of Falstaff in another play, the presence of the bastard
Faulconbridge, with his physical energy and his unmistakable family
likeness--"those limbs [188] which Sir Robert never holp to make"*
contributes to an almost coarse assertion of the force of nature, of
the somewhat ironic preponderance of nature and circumstance over men's
artificial arrangements, to, the recognition of a certain potent
natural aristocracy, which is far from being always identical with that
more formal, heraldic one. And what is a coarse fact in the case of
Faulconbridge becomes a motive of pathetic appeal in the wan and
babyish Arthur. The magic with which nature models tiny and delicate
children to the likeness of their rough fathers is nowhere more justly
expressed than in the words of King Philip.--

Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face
These eyes, these brows were moulded out of his:
This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geoffrey; and the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

It was perhaps something of a boyish memory of the shocking end of his
father that had distorted the piety of Henry the Third into
superstitious terror. A frightened soul, himself touched with the
contrary sort of religious madness, doting on all that was alien from
his father's huge ferocity, on the genialities, the soft gilding, of
life, on the genuine interests of art and poetry, to be credited more
than any other person with the deep religious expression of [189]
Westminster Abbey, Henry the Third, picturesque though useless, but
certainly touching, might have furnished Shakespeare, had he filled up
this interval in his series, with precisely the kind of effect he tends
towards in his English plays. But he found it completer still in the
person and story of Richard the Second, a figure--"that sweet lovely
rose"--which haunts Shakespeare's mind, as it seems long to have
haunted the minds of the English people, as the most touching of all
examples of the irony of kingship.

Henry the Fourth--to look for a moment beyond our immediate subject, in
pursui