his will, and yet bear the blame as if acting of his own accord. And afterwards, when the consequences begin to press upon him, he accuses the aptness of the instrument as the cause of his suggestion; and the only sagacity he displays is in shirking the responsibility of his own guilty purpose; his sneaking, selfish fear inspiring him with a quickness and fertility of thought far beyond his capacity under any nobler influences.

The chief trouble with John in the play is, that he conceives himself in a false position, and so becomes himself false to his position in the hope of thereby rendering it secure. He has indeed far better reasons for holding the throne than he is himself aware of, and the utter selfishness of his aims is what keeps him from seeing them. His soul is so bemired in personal regards, that he cannot rise to any considerations of patriotism or public spirit. The idea of wearing the crown as a sacred trust from the nation never once enters his head. And this is all because he lacks the nobleness to rest his title on national grounds; or because he is himself too lawless of spirit to feel the majesty with which the national law has invested him. As the interest and honour of England have no place in his thoughts, so he feels as if he had stolen the throne, and appropriated it to his own private use. This consciousness of bad motives naturally fills him with dark suspicions and sinister designs. As he is without the inward strength of noble aims, so he does not feel outwardly strong; his bad motives put him upon using means as bad for securing himself; and he can think of no way to clinch his tenure but by meanness and wrong.. Thus his sense of inherent baseness has the effect of casting him into disgraces and crimes; his very stings of self-reproach driving him on from bad to worse. If he had the manhood to trust his cause frankly with the nation, as rightly comprehending his trust, he would be strong in the nation's support; but this he is too mean to see.

Nor is John less wanting in manly fortitude than in moral principle: he has not the courage even to be daringly

and resolutely wicked; that is, there is no backbone of truth in him either for good or for evil. Insolent, heartswollen, defiant under success, he becomes utterly abject and cringing in disaster or reverse. "Even so doth valour's show and valour's worth divide in storms of fortune." When his wishes are crowned, he struts and talks big; but a slight whirl in the wind of chance at once twists him off his pins and lays him sprawling in the mud. That his seeming greatness is but the distention of gas, appears in that the touch of pain or loss soon pricks him into an utter collapse. So that we may almost apply to him what Ulysses says of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida:

"Possess'd he is with greatness;

And speaks not to himself, but with a pride
That quarrels at self-breath: imagin'd worth
Holds in his blood such swoln and hot discourse,
That 'twixt his mental and his active parts
Kingdom'd Achilles in commotion rages,
And batters down himself."

And as, in his craven-hearted selfishness, John cares nothing for England's honour, nor even for his own as king, but only to retain the spoil of his self-imputed trespass; so he will at any time trade that honour away, and will not mind eating dirt to the King of France or to the Pope, so he may keep his place.

All this was no doubt partly owing to the demoralizing influences of the time. And how deeply those influences worked is well shown in the hoary-headed fraud and heartlessness of priestcraft as represented in Cardinal Pandulf; who makes it his special business to abuse the highest faculties to the most refined ill purposes; with subtle and tortuous casuistry explaining away perfidy, treachery, and murder into works of righteousness. The arts of deceit could hardly have come to be used with such unctious selfapproval, but from a long discipline of civilized selfishness in endeavouring to prevent or to parry the assaults of violence and barbarism. For, in a state of continual danger

and insecurity, cultivated intelligence is naturally drawn to defend itself by subtlety and craft. The ethereal weapons of reason and sanctity are powerless upon men stupefied by brutal passions; and this is too apt to generate even in the best characters a habit of seeking safety by "bowing their gray dissimulation" into whatever causes they take in hand. Which, I suspect, would go far to explain the alleged system of "pious frauds" once so little scrupled in the walks of religion and learning. Be this as it may, there was, it seems, virtue enough in the England of King John to bring her safe and sound through the vast perils and corruptions of the time. That reign was in truth the seed-bed of those forces which have since made England so great and wise and free.

All through the reigns of Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth, the lately-experienced horrors of civil slaughter in the York and Lancaster wars made the English people nervously apprehensive as to the consequences of a disputed title to the throne. This apprehension had by no means worn off in Shakespeare's time: the nation was still extremely tenacious of the lineal succession, as the only practicable safeguard against the danger of rival claimants. The dogma of the divine right, which then got such headway, was probably more or less the offspring of this sentiment. It has often seemed to me that the Poet, in his sympathy with this strong national feeling, was swayed somewhat from the strict line of historic truth and reason, in ascribing John's crimes and follies, and the evils of his reign, so much to a public distrust of his title. I question whether such distrust really had any considerable hand in those evils. The King's title was generally held at the time to be every way sound and clear. The nervous dread of a disputed succession was mainly the growth of later. experience, and then was putatively transferred to a time when, in fact, it had been little felt. And the anxiety to fence off the evils so dreaded naturally caused the powers

of the crown to be strained up to a pitch hardly compatible with any degree of freedom; insomuch that in no long time another civil war became necessary, to keep the liberties of England from being swallowed up in the Serbonian bog of royal prerogative. In the apprehension of an experienced danger on one side, men comparatively lost sight of an equal danger on the other side.

I suspect that the genius and art of Mrs. Siddons caused the critics of her time and their immediate successors to set a higher estimate upon the delineation of Constance than is fully justified by the work itself. The part seems indeed to have been peculiarly suited to the powers of that remarkable actress; the wide range of moods, and the tugging conflicts of passion, through which Constance passes, affording scope enough for the most versatile gifts of delivery. If I am right in my notion, Shakespearian criticism has not even yet quite shaken off the spell thus cast upon it. At all events, I find the critics still pitching their praise of the part in a somewhat higher key than I can persuade my voice to sound. The abatement, however, which I would make refers not so much to the conception of the character as to the style of the execution; which, it seems to me, is far from displaying the Poet's full strength and inwardness with nature. There is in many of her speeches a redundancy of rhetoric and verbal ingenuity, giving them a too theatrical relish. The style thus falls under a reproof well expressed in this very play:

"When workmen strive to do better than well,

They do confound their skill in covetousness."

In pursuance of the same thought, Bacon finely remarks the great practical difference between the love of excellence and the love of excelling. And so here we seem to have rather too much of that elaborate artificialness which springs more from ambition than from inspiration. But the fault is among those which I have elsewhere noted as marking the workmanship of the Poet's earlier period.

The idea pervading the delineation is well stated by Hazlitt as "the excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desperate by the fickleness of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made stronger in will, in proportion to the want of all other power." In the judgment of Gervinus, "ambition spurred by maternal love, maternal love fired by ambition. and womanly vanity, form the distinguishing features" of Constance; and he further describes her as 66 a woman whose weakness amounts to grandeur, and whose virtues sink into weakness." I am not indeed greatly in love with this brilliant way of putting things; but Gervinus is apt to be substantially right in such matters. My own tamer view is that the character, though drawn in the best of situ.. ations for its amiability to appear, is not a very amiable one. Herein the play is perhaps the truer to history; as the chroniclers make Constance out rather selfish and weak; not so religious in motherhood but that she betrayed a somewhat unvenerable impatience of widowhood. Nevertheless it must be owned that the soul of maternal grief and affection speaks from her lips with not a little majesty of pathos, and occasionally flows in strains of the most melting tenderness. I know not how the voice of a mother's sorrow could discourse more eloquently than in these lines:

"Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me;
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form :
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief."

Nor is there any overstraining of nature in the imagery here used; for the speaker's passion is of just the right kind and degree to kindle the imagination into the richest and finest utterance.

On the other hand, the general effect of her sorrow is marred by too great an infusion of anger, and she shows too much pride, self-will, and volubility of scorn, to have