ing Richard's land:--

frighting "fair peace" from "our quiet confines," laying

The summer's dust with showers of blood,
Rained from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen:

bruising

Her flowerets with the armed hoofs
Of hostile paces.

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to note in this play a peculiar recoil
from the mere instruments of warfare, the contact of the "rude ribs,"
the "flint bosom," of Barkloughly Castle or Pomfret or

Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower:

the

Boisterous untun'd drums
With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray
And grating shock of wrathful iron arms.

It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least by
contrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly,
Shakespeare's [194] English kings possess: they are a very eloquent
company, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all. In no
other play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh,
variegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attached
to, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannot
help dispensing to his characters, as in this "play of the Deposing of
King Richard the Second," an exquisite poet if he is nothing else, from
first to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all things
poetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, and
refreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironic
contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessities
of his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blank verse,
infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes indeed a
true "verse royal," that rhyming lapse, which to the Shakespearian ear,
at least in youth, came as the last touch of refinement on it, being
here doubly appropriate. His eloquence blends with that fatal beauty,
of which he was so frankly aware, so amiable to his friends, to his
wife, of the effects of which on the people his enemies were so much
afraid, on which Shakespeare himself dwells so attentively as the
"royal blood" comes and goes in the face with his rapid changes of
temper. As happens with sensitive natures, it attunes him to a
congruous suavity of manners, by which anger itself became flattering:
[195] it blends with his merely youthful hopefulness and high spirits,
his sympathetic love for gay people, things, apparel--"his cote of gold
and stone, valued at thirty thousand marks," the novel Italian