ke in _Richard II._
who betrays most effectively the tranquillising influence of
patriotism. In him the patriotic instinct inclines to identity with
the simple spirit of domesticity. It is a magnified love for his own
hearthstone--a glorified home-sickness. The very soil of England,
England's ground, excites in Bolingbroke an overmastering sentiment of
devotion. His main happiness in life resides in the thought that
England is his mother and his nurse. The patriotic instinct thus
exerts on a character which is naturally cold and unsympathetic a
softening, soothing, and purifying sway. Despite his forbidding
self-absorption and personal ambition he touches hearts, and rarely
fails to draw tears when he sighs forth the bald lines:--

Where'er I wander, boast of this I can,
Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman.

In such a shape the patriotic instinct may tend in natures weaker than
Bolingbroke's to mawkishness or sentimentality. But it is incapable of
active offence. It makes for the peace and goodwill not merely of
nations among themselves, but of the constituent elements of each
nation within itself. It unifies human aspiration and breeds social
harmony.

Very different is the phase of the patriotic instinct which is
portrayed in the more joyous, more frank, and more impulsive
characters of Faulconbridge the Bastard in the play of _King John_,
and of the King in _Henry V._ It is in them an inexhaustible stimulus
to action. It is never quiescent, but its operations are regulated by
morality and reason, and it finally induces a serene exaltation of
temper. It was a pardonable foible of Elizabethan writers distinctly
to identify with the English character this healthily energetic sort
of patriotism--the sort of patriotism to which an atmosphere of
knavery or folly proves fatal.

Faulconbridge is an admirable embodiment of the patriotic sentiment in
its most attractive guise. He is a manly soldier, blunt in speech,
contemning subterfuge, chafing against the dictates of political
expediency, and believing that quarrels between nations which cannot
be accommodated without loss of self-respect on the one side or the
other, had better be fought out in resolute and honourable war. He is
the sworn foe of the bully or the braggart. Cruelty is hateful to him.
The patriotic instinct nurtures in him a warm and generous humanity.
His faith in the future of his nation depends on the confident hope
that she will be t