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That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,

Or nicely charge your understanding soul

With opening titles miscreate, whose right

Suits not in native colours with the truth.

For God doth know how many now in health

Shall drop their blood, in approbation

Of what your reverence shall incite us to.

Therefore take heed how you impawn your person,

How you awake our sleeping sword of war;

We charge you in the name of God, take heed.

For never two such kingdoms did contend

Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops

Are every one a woe, a sore complaint

'Gainst him, whose wrong gives edge unto the swords

That make such waste in brief mortality.

Under this conjuration, speak, my lord;

For we will hear, note, and believe in heart,

That what you speak, is in your conscience wash'd,

As pure as sin with baptism.

Another characteristic instance of the blindness of human nature to everything but its own interests is the complaint made by the king of 'the ill neighbourhood' of the Scot in attacking England when she was attacking France.

For once the eagle England being in prey,

To her unguarded nest the weazel Scot

Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs.

It is worth observing that in all these plays, which give an admirable picture of the spirit of the good old times, the moral inference does not at all depend upon the nature of the actions, but on the dignity or meanness of the persons committing them. 'The eagle England' has a right 'to be in prey', but 'the weazel Scot' has none 'to come sneaking to her nest', which she has left to pounce upon others. Might was right, without equivocation or disguise, in that heroic and chivalrous age. The substitution of right for might, even in theory, is among the refinements and abuses of modern philosophy.

A more beautiful rhetorical delineation of the effects of subordination in a commonwealth can hardly be conceived than the following:

For government, though high and low and lower,

Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,

Congruing in a full and natural close,

Like music.

—Therefore heaven doth divide

The state of man in divers functions,

Setting endeavour in continual motion;

To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,

Obedience; for so work the honey bees;

Creatures that by a rule in nature, teach

The art of order to a peopled kingdom.

They have a king, and officers of sorts:

Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;

Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;

Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,

Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;

Which pillage they with merry march bring home

To the tent-royal of their emperor;

Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing mason building roofs of gold;

The civil citizens kneading up the honey;

The poor mechanic porters crowding in

Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate;

The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,

Delivering o'er to executors pale

The lazy yawning drone. I this infer,—

That many things, having full reference

To one consent, may work contrariously:

As many arrows, loosed several ways,

Fly to one mark;

As many several ways meet in one town;

As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea;

As many lines close in the dial's centre;

So may a thousand actions, once a-foot,

End in one purpose, and be all well borne

Without defeat.

HENRY V is but one of Shakespeare's second-rate plays. Yet by quoting passages, like this, from his second-rate plays alone, we might make a volume 'rich with his praise',

As is the oozy bottom of the sea

With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.

Of this sort are the king's remonstrance to Scroop, Grey, and Cambridge, on the detection of their treason, his address to the soldiers at the siege of Harfleur, and the still finer one before the battle of Agincourt, the description of the night before the battle, and the reflections on ceremony put into the mouth of the king.

O hard condition; twin-born with greatness,

Subjected to the breath of every fool,

Whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing!