e result of the great battle as a matter of course, and experiences
something of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure, or at least to
attune and soften men's griefs. As in some sweet anthem of Handel, the
sufferer, who put finger to the organ under the utmost pressure of
mental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at last from the mere skill
with which he sets his distress to music.--

Beshrew thee, Cousin, that didst lead me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!

[201] "With Cain go wander through the shades of night!" cries the new
king to the gaoler Exton, dissimulating his share in the murder he is
thought to have suggested; and in truth there is something of the
murdered Abel about Shakespeare's Richard. The fact seems to be that
he died of "waste and a broken heart:" it was by way of proof that his
end had been a natural one that, stifling a real fear of the face, the
face of Richard, on men's minds, with the added pleading now of all
dead faces, Henry exposed the corpse to general view; and Shakespeare,
in bringing it on the stage, in the last scene of his play, does but
follow out the motive with which he has emphasised Richard's physical
beauty all through it--that "most beauteous inn," as the Queen says
quaintly, meeting him on the way to death--residence, then soon to be
deserted, of that wayward, frenzied, but withal so affectionate soul.
Though the body did not go to Westminster immediately, his tomb,

That small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones,*

the effigy clasping the hand of his youthful consort, was already
prepared there, with "rich [202] gilding and ornaments," monument of
poetic regret, for Queen Anne of Bohemia, not of course the "Queen" of
Shakespeare, who however seems to have transferred to this second wife
something of Richard's wildly proclaimed affection for the first. In
this way, through the connecting link of that sacred spot, our thoughts
once more associate Richard's two fallacious prerogatives, his personal
beauty and his "anointing."

According to Johnson, Richard the Second is one of those plays which
Shakespeare has "apparently revised;" and how doubly delightful
Shakespeare is where he seems to have revised! "Would that he had
blotted a thousand"--a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture once more
to say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome German
superstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmat