in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197]
since continued. And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as in
Richard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites were
calculated to produce.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king,--

as supplementing another, almost supernatural, right.--"Edward's seven
sons," of whom Richard's father was one,

Were as seven phials of his sacred blood.

But this, too, in the hands of Shakespeare, becomes for him, like any
other of those fantastic, ineffectual, easily discredited, personal
graces, as capricious in its operation on men's wills as merely
physical beauty, kindling himself to eloquence indeed, but only giving
double pathos to insults which "barbarism itself" might have
pitied--the dust in his face, as he returns, through the streets of
London, a prisoner in the train of his victorious enemy.

How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face!

he cries, in that most poetic invention of the mirror scene, which does
but reinforce again that physical charm which all confessed. The sense
of "divine right" in kings is found to act not so much as a secret of
power over others, as of infatuation to themselves. And of all those
personal gifts the one which alone never altogether fails him is just
that royal utterance, his [198] appreciation of the poetry of his own
hapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infecting others in spite of
themselves, till they too become irresistibly eloquent about him.

In the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really a
part, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of
"degradation," such as that by which an offending priest or bishop may
be deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders," yet, one by
one, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind
some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or military
ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of
unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene where
Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony,
reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of
intelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity of
poetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class, with
the finest "vermeil and ivory" work of Chatterton or Keats.

Fetch hither Richard that in common view
He may