fashions
he preferred, as also with those real amiabilities that made people
forget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of the
pathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed
merely abject in a less graceful performer.

Yet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking "revival" of King
Richard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were very young
thirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare's play could
ever have been before--the very person of the king based on the stately
old portrait in Westminster Abbey, "the earliest extant contemporary
likeness of any English sovereign," the grace, the winning pathos, the
sympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful archaeology confronting
vulgar modern London with a scenic reproduction, for once really
agreeable, of the London of Chaucer. In the hands of Kean the play
became like an exquisite performance on the violin.

The long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his
"tragic abdication" till the hour in which he

Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood,

was for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became early the
theme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied surviving
favourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work.

The king Richard of Yngland
Was in his flowris then regnand:
But his flowris efter sone
Fadyt, and ware all undone:--

says the old chronicle. Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes him an
over-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which people
in Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general right,
sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable personal
gift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast and
shoulders--of the "holy oil" of his consecration at Westminster; not,
however, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at the
coronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by the Blessed
Virgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Richard himself found that, it
was said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis of his
changing fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecration
therewith--understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happier
rival. And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, the
learned care, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only eleven
years of age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, was
carried away