The adversary of my Bobadil on this occasion was a fiery little Gascon wine-merchant, "excellent at his weapon," and thoroughly resolved to thrust it "home to the bosom and business " of poor Bobadil, to whom he owed a deep grudge, for domestic reasons of no import here or there. I had consented to be one of the officiating friends to my travelling acquaintance. The other témoin was a tall mustachioed cuirassier of the garrison, a great favourite of Bobadil's wife. The ground chosen for the rencontre was the glacis of an old fort on the skirts of the town, the ditch of which was full ten feet deep of stagnant water, with slimy banks and a muddy bed. Not far from the edge of this the combatants took their stand, on an autumnal morning, no matter how few or how many years ago. My hero looked, like Bobadil's favourite oath," the very heart of valour." He threw off his coat, and tucked up his shirt sleeves, and " hollowed his body," and "twined it more about," and measured his enemy with his eye, and rehearsed his punto, his reverso, his stocatto, imbroccata, and passado, really as if he had read the directions to "Master Mathew" that very morning. One of them, however, he paid not the least attention to-"Stand fast o' your left leg," was a word of command he had no notion of obeying, though often and with terrible emphasis was it roared out to him at the top of the Gascon's voice, with other similar invitations, if heard not heeded.

"Sacré tonnêre !

Pied ferme, que Je t'attrape, coquin! Pied ferme, scelerat! En garde, poltron! Ha! ha! ça !" cried the Gascon, with a thrust as quick as lightning, and of force sufficient to have pierced a rhinoceros.

"Allons! viens donc, petit — !" (I cannot give the epithet) responded Bobadil, springing back three paces for every forward bound of his adversary, and eluding each lunge and plunge, which it would have taken Briærius's hundred arms joined one to another to have made effective, nothing short of that could have reached him.

I have rarely witnessed a scene more risible. My brother témoin, as well as those of the little Gascon, joined me at length in those hearty bursts of laughter which brought the soldiers out on the walls of the fort, and crowds of ragged and squalid-looking creatures from the huts of the Faubourg, to witness and enjoy the sport. The contortions of the Gascon, his fury, his imprecations, his gestures, his reproaches, his exhortations to his foe to come to close quarters, are not to be written. The intrepid poltroonery of Bobadil baffling all the furious ardour of the assault was equally indescribable. Nothing was ever like the scene since the day that Friday kept the bear a-dancing on the branch of the cork-tree in the Pyrenees.

During the whole of this acted charade, the mot of which seemed never to be forthcoming, the great point of Bobadil's tactics was to keep the Gascon between him and the ditch. At length, however, pressed harder and harder, out of breath, and, as I clearly perceived, panic-struck by the ferocious bearing of his half-maddened enemy, he lost his self-command, and suffered himself to be placed in that position from which there was no retreat. During the combat (so to call it) he had never made a single lunge nor attempted to parry one; scarcely did he allow the points of the fleurets to come in contact together. But now the change was frightful. The infuriated Gascon closed upon him,

panting, foaming, breathless, but still in the full vigour of his vengeance and his skill. The blades crossed and clashed; the whisk of the thin steel told that the desperate thrust was made and parried. No one laughed now! I felt that cramped spasmodic anxiety with which one waits the shot or the lunge which carries life or death on its results. My eye was fixed on my man. The other officiating "friend" gazed and gaped as I did. Another instant! It came. The Gascon, perfect master of his game, now seemed to concentrate all his nerve for the fatal coup de grace. He struck down the feeble and insufficient blade that scarce offered resistance. The unguarded body of the subdued Doctor was close before him-a broad and comely mark. The final thrust was sped, with a hoarse yet loud exclamation of fierce triumphbut not sent home. For, lo! the apparently doomed carcase of Bobadil had disappeared. With monstrous presence of mind he waited just till very nick of time, and, in the last critical moment of his threatened fate, he touched the edge of the ditch, then flung a backward summerset, and a loud splash in the water told the rest.

the

The Gascon, following the impulse of his lunge, had fallen headlong after him had not one of his friends caught him in his arms. It required the united efforts of both to prevent him jumping into the fosse, (as Hamlet sprang into Ophelia's grave,) and doing instant execution on the half-drowned coward who had thus escaped him.

And well had it been for poor Bobadil that he had died in the ditch, either by cold water or cold iron! Some shadow of doubt might in that case have hung on the event. It might have been thought that he slipped in by accident-that he had waited so long to exhaust his impetuous foe and make him a surer prey-at any rate, he would have gone out of life with a joke, not a dry one neither, attached to his memory. But by ill-luck he contrived to keep himself afloat, to scramble up the side of the fosse, and to make his way home, dripping and mudcovered, followed by a mob of hooting ragamuffins.

"friend"

It may be easily believed I had no great wish to see my after this catastrophe. A smart fever, the effect of his ducking, confined him to his bed and house for some weeks. I was not sorry that circumstances called me far from the neighbourhood before his recovery. My departure must have been a relief to him; but a still greater was the apropos removal to country quarters of his other second, the mustachioed cuirassier, who swore that he felt his disgraceful conduct in the duel as a personal affront, and that he would inflict a most terrific horsewhipping on him when he became sufficiently convalescent to endure the lash.

I learned that Bobadil blustered away for a short time in spite this affair. He vaunted loudly his courage and coolness throughout, cursed the unlucky faux pas which plunged him into the ditch, and saved the little wine-merchant from otherwise inevitable death; and appealed loudly to the testimony of the absent cuirassier and to myself. But still a canker-worm seemed to prey on him, and he was preparing to dispose of his property and quit the country under various pretences, when he one day met in the streets a man whose apparition was a hundred times worse to him than the united return of all the witnesses to the exploit I have recorded. This was a British officer whom he had

once long before denounced to the French government, when the latter was a prisoner of war on his parole. The consequence of which was the officer's being put in prison, loaded with indignities-among which was a most abusive letter from Bobadil—and being finally marched to a distant town, ironed like a common felon, before he obtained his exchange. On meeting Bobadil there was but one course for him to follow. He called him out, intimating that the case was one which required that one of the parties should fall on the field. What cared Bobadil? not a sous! "The heart of valour" was up-till the morning came, when his chief second, a fine-spirited Frenchman, an old neighbour of his, went to him by appointment to bring him to the ground. He found him locked in the arms of his wife-in tearsruined-lost for ever!

"Gentlemen," said the second, when he arrived at the ground alone, and found the English captain and his two témoins waiting, "Gentlemen, I am guilty of having a coward for my friend. I am responsible for his fault and my own: the only atonement I can make is to fight ye all one after the other. Gentlemen, I am ready! Begin which ever chooses!"

I need not add that the brave Frenchman found no antagonist among the Englishmen; but I must record that three Americans, hearing of the circumstance, immediately came forward and offered to stand in the place of their hapless countryman-a unique specimen of his nation, certainly, as far as pluck was in question. This offer had of course the same result as the former-that is to say, several pure friendships arose out of one dirty quarrel.

In about a year afterwards-how rapid time flew, and what havoc he made-I was sitting in my drawing-room near five hundred miles distant from the scene of these adventures. It was one of those meditative evenings towards the end of the year, when the mind insensibly turns back, and the whole tide of thought and feeling is refluent. In the spring of the year, as in that of life, we look forward and abroad; but autumn is the season of reflection and home. I was absorbed and listless; I heard no foot on the stairs-no announcement by the servant-no opening of the door even: but a hasty stride across the floor caused me to raise my eyes. I thought a spectre stood before me.

"You don't know me?

sepulchral voice.

No wonder. I am a dead man!" said a

"Good Heaven, is it possible?" exclaimed I, starting up. "Is this Doctor-❞

"Don't pronounce my name," said he, with a thrilling tone of despair.

He threw himself on a sofa and panted from exhaustion. I offered him everything-he refused to take any.

"I have but five minutes to stay with you," said he, still in tones hollow and broken. "You have, no doubt, heard all that has passed since we parted. You have, perhaps, like the rest of the world, misjudged me, unheard and unappreciated. Ah, Sir! this same world is a vile world of prejudice and injustice-and I am its victim. Courage! Do I not possess it now-moral courage at least? Can they deny me that? How many of your heroes would have died shivering in their

beds with such an accumulation of ills as press me down, while I have boldly confronted fatigue, suffering, and death itself in seeking all resources against danger? Here I have been to Paris to try one last desperate remedy. I was two days back tapped for a dropsy, yet I am now en route again, able for any effort-defying every peril to myself, though I had not the courage wantonly to leave my wife a widow and my child an orphan. You remember our first conversation? Be satisfied, then, that I am Doctor enough to know that my whole system is broken up-and so little of a diplomatist as to confess that my heart is broken. I see you are sorry for me. Well, that's some comfort. I am now going as fast as I can travel to catch a last glimpse of the only object dear to me in life;-Heaven grant me strength!" Tears rolled down his livid and hollowed cheeks.

"Heaven bless you!" murmured he, grasping my hand in his bony "We shall never meet again! I am dying fast-oh, how fast! I must go on-I must go on !"

one.

He raised himself up, tottered quickly across the room, then stopped short, turned round, and said hurriedly

"You will receive a cask of first-rate wine in a day or two. You know what sort my best Bordeaux was of. Drink it to my memory. Farewell!"

His last thought was one of generosity-perhaps of justice. No matter; it was a virtue in either case: and these were the last words I heard from my unfortunate visitor. He rushed feebly down stairs and out of the door, and scrambled without any aid into his carriage, an open calêche. A young gentleman of pleasing appearance waited for him. I was delighted to see that he was not alone, and that he had such a companion to take care of him. A bow and a glance were exchanged between the stranger and myself: we seemed to understand each other. The postillion dashed on; I returned into the house. For two nights and a day it seemed haunted by the gaunt and haggard figure of the once handsome and portly subject of this sketch, and I have no feeling for his memory but one of kindness and compassion.

The second morning after this visit the cask of genuine Lafitte arrived at my door. In an hour afterwards a letter was put into my hands from the amiable young stranger, an Englishman, to tell me that his friend -yes, after all that had passed, he had the manliness to record and stand by the word-that his friend had died, almost suddenly, on the very night he paid me his never-to-be-forgotten visit.

SHAKSPEARE'S HISTORICAL PLAYS CONSIDERED
HISTORICALLY.-NO. IV.*
*

BY THE RIGHT HON. T. P. COURTENAY.

THE Second Part of " Henry the Fourth" commences with a scene which was in my time familiar to play-goers, though not as part of this play; Colley Cibber thought fit to adopt parts of it into his irreverent alteration of Shakspeare's "Richard the Third," where the doubts and lamentations of Northumberland, on hearing the various accounts of the battle of Shrewsbury, are transferred to Henry the Sixth, and the battle of Tewksbury.

One passage is given to Gloucester himself; and it must be owned that the following lines are more appropriate to the dying Richard than to the irresolute Earl of the north.

"Let heaven kiss earth! Now let not nature's hand

Keep the white flood confined! Let order die !
And let this world no longer be a stage,

To feed contention in a lingering act;

But let one spirit of the first-born Cain

Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead!"

According to Shakspeare, Northumberland, who had been craftysick,† while his heroic son was fighting, is now persuaded by his friends to renew the rebellious war, and he is encouraged by the information, that

"The gentle Archbishop of York is up
With well-appointed powers."

The epithet here applied to the warlike prelate might perhaps remind one of the way in which the "Gradus ad Parnassum" was sometimes used at school, when a boy, finding magnanimus among the epithets of dux, or timida among those of puella, would think himself justified in thus illustrating the names of his hero and heroine, though the one might be a coward and the other an Amazon.

"The archbishop, coming forth among them clad in armour, encouraged, exhorted, and, by all means he could, pricked them forth to undertake the enterprize in hand, and manfully to continue in their begun purpose, promising forgiveness of sins to all them whose hap it was to die in the quarrel."§

the

But Shakspeare had nevertheless better grounds for his epithet, in passage which Holinshed adds:

"Indeed the respect that men had to the archbishop caused them to like the better of the cause, since the gravity of his age, his integrity of life, and incomparable learning, with the reverend aspect of his amiable personage, moved all men to have him in no small estimation."

This prelate was Richard Scrope,

*Continued from No. ccxii. p. 479.

+ Introduction to the Second Part of "Henry the Fourth."

Principally Lord Bardolph. William Phelip, who married the heiress of the ancient Bardolphs, and got the title. Banks, ii. 29. He was Lieutenant of Calais. § Hol., iii. 36, from Wals., 373.