associations connected with the sound of church bells;

"If ever you have look'd on better days,

If ever been where bells have knell'd to church."*

But I doubt whether he was familiar with the effects of an interdict; and he found not even the outline of Hume's picture in Holinshed; indeed, Hume himself gives a rather poetical version of the chronicle to which he refers.

RICHARD II.—Though not desirous of dwelling upon controversy, I must mention, that under this reign, my critic gives, in one instance, Holinshed and Shakspeare in parallel columns.† The same editor suggests (p. 101) that Shakspeare might have dramatized the insurrection of Wat Tyler. It has been seen that our poet transferred parts of this story to that of Jack Cade, which had really a different character.

HENRY IV. Of the passage quoted in vol. i.

* As you Like It, Act ii. Sc. 7. Bosw., vi. 407.

† P. 156. The editor has remarked (p.127) on an observation of mine (i. 58), that a more minute knowledge of history would, in a particular case, have been useful to Shakspeare. I should have said, more minute attention to history; for it is true that Holinshed, whom the poet consulted, tells the story to which I refer.

i. 303.

p. 109, descriptive of Prince Henry and his followers, Burke says,*

There are many descriptions in the poets and orators, which owe their sublimity to a richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact coherence and agreement of the allusion, which we should require on every other occasion. I do not now remember a more striking example of this than the description which is given of the king's army in the play of Henry IV.—“ All furnished, all in arms," &c.

Gifford quotes from Worcester's speech in the first part,

"I'll read you matter deep and dangerous,
As full of peril and adventurous spirit,
As to o'erwalk a current, roaring loud,
On the uncertain footing of a spear."‡

He says that Massinger borrowed "a noble figure" from this passage, when he wrote,—

"What a bridge

Of glass I walk upon, over a river

Of certain ruin, mine own weighty fears
Cracking what should support me."§

* Works, i. 188.

+ Mass.,

i. P.

Acti. Sc. 3. Bosw. xvi. 222.

§ Bondman, Act iv. Sc. 3. Giff., ii. 91.

cxxxiii.

And Massinger, he says, "has improved upon his original."

I see neither the imitation nor the improvement; I like Shakspeare's simple figure better than the other, which partakes of the conceit.

HENRY V.- Mr. Collier says, * "the History of Sir John Oldcastle,"-an old play by four authors,-furnished Shakspeare with hints for the scene in which the king discloses his knowledge of the conspiracy of Lord Scope and the others.

HENRY VI.-Hallam says

"In default of a more probable claimant, I have sometimes been inclined to assign the first part of Henry VI. to Greene. The first part,

however, of Henry VI. is, in some passages, not unworthy of Shakspeare's earlier days, nor, in my judgment, unlike his style; nor, in fact, do I know any one of his contemporaries who could have written the scene in the Temple Garden.† The light touches of his pencil have ever been still more inimitative, if possible, than its more elaborate strokes."‡

In the former volume, I declined giving an opinion upon the authorship of the first part of

*Poetical Decameron, i. 52.
+ See i. 243.
‡ i. 379.

Henry VI. I now confess myself inclined to agree with Hallam, that this scene in the garden has deep marks of Shakspeare's hand.

The same author observes,* that " some of the passages most popular in the second and third parts, such as the death of Cardinal Beaufort,† and the last speech of the Duke of York, are not by his hand."

It appears to me that the death-bed scene in Shakspeare's play is so materially altered from that in "The Contention," as to constitute a new work of which Shakspeare is to have the credit, as fully as if he had taken it from a prose chronicle.

According to the commentators, Shakspeare scarcely altered the last speech of York from the original. § I humbly suggest, that it is not worth contending for.

RICHARD III.-Hallam has no remark upon this play. Coleridge says, "pride of intellect is the characteristic of Richard. Shakspeare here, as in all his great parts, developes, in a tone of sublime morality, the dreadful consequences of placing the moral in subordination

* i. 377.

† See Bosw. xviii. 276.

+ See i. 289.

Bosw. iii. 397, and see ante p. 11.

to the intellectual being." This is not a bad specimen of Coleridge's elaborate fancifulness. Richard is an ambitious man, who disregards morality in the pursuit of his end, and is finally overcome by a combination which, for dramatic effect, is represented as a righteous resistance offered to tyranny and usurpation.

HENRY VIII.-Campbell takes a remarkable view of Shakspeare's motive, in his management of the character and conduct of this king. He assumes that Shakspeare did not believe Henry to be impelled by conscientious scruples to divorce Catherine; but observes that he nevertheless

Contrives, though at some sacrifice of historical truth, to raise the matron Catherine to our highest admiration, whilst, at the same time, he keeps us in love with Anne Boleyn, and on tolerable terms with Henry VIII. But who does not see (he adds), under all this wise management, the drift of his design, namely, to compliment Elizabeth as a virgin queen, to interest us in the memory of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and to impress us with a belief of her innocence, though she suffered as an alleged traitress to the bed of Henry. The private death of Catherine of Arragon might have been still remembered by many living persons, but the death of Anne Boleyn