senting the former unmixed and free, the man of the man.

We have a very striking instance of this in _King Henry the Fifth_,
where the Boy, who figures as servant to Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym,
soliloquizes his judgment of those worthies: "As young as I am, I have
observed these three swashers. I am boy to them all three; but they
all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for
indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph,--he is
white-liver'd and red-fac'd; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but
fights not. For Pistol,--he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword;
by the means whereof 'a breaks words, and keeps whole weapons. For
Nym,--he hath heard that men of few words are the best men; and
therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a
coward: but his few bad words are match'd with as few good deeds; for
'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post
when he was drunk. They will steal any thing, and call it purchase.
Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for
three half-pence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching; and
in Calais they stole a fire-shovel: I knew by that piece of service
the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's
pockets as their gloves or their handkerchers: which makes much
against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into
mine; for it is plain pocketing-up of wrongs. I must leave them, and
seek some better service: their villainy goes against my weak stomach,
and therefore I must cast it up."

Here one might think the Poet must have lapsed a little from the
character in making the Boy talk such a high and solid strain of
intelligence: but it is not so; the Boy talks strictly in character.
The intellect he shows is all truly his own too, but not his own in
that space of time. He has indeed a shrewd, quick eye, and knows a
thing or two; still he could not, unaided and alone, deliver so much
intellect in a whole month as he here lets off in this brief speech.
Shakespeare just inspires the youngster, and the effect of that
inspiration is to make him so much the more himself.

But the process of the thing involves, moreover, a sort of double
consciousness, which probably cannot be altogether explained. The Poet
had a strange faculty, or at least had it in a strange degree, of
being truly himself and truly another at one and the same time.