pulses, making up the individual character. We think of her as a mother, because, as a mother distracted for the loss of her son, she is immediately presented before us, and calls forth our sympathy and our tears; but we infer the rest of her character from what we see, as certainly, and as completely as if we had known her whole course of life.

That which strikes us as the principal attribute of Constance is power-power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride; the moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient—or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary development of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical coloring, leaves the other qualities comparatively subordinate. Hence it is that the whole complexion of the character, notwithstanding its amazing grandeur, is so exquisitely feminine. The weakness of the woman, who by the very consciousness of that weakness is worked up to desperation and defiance, the fluctuations of temper and the bursts of sublime passion, the terrors, the impatience, and the tears, are all most true to feminine nature. The energy of Constance not being based upon strength of character, rises and falls with the tide of passion. Her haughty spirit swells against resistance, and is excited into frenzy by sorrow and disappointment; while neither from her towering pride, nor her strength of intellect, can she borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure. It is, therefore with perfect truth of nature that Constance is first introduced as pleading for peace.

Stay for an answer to your embassy,

Lest unadvised you stain your swords with blood;
My Lord Chatillon may from England bring
That right in peace, which here we urge in war,
And then we shall repent each drop of blood,
That hot, rash haste so indirectly shed,

And that the same woman, when all her passions are roused by the sense of injury, should afterwards exclaim,

War, war! No peace! peace is to me a war!

That she should be ambitious for her son, proud of his
high birth and royal rights, and violent in defending them,
is most natural; but I cannot agree with those who think
that in the mind of Constance ambition—that is, the love or
dominion for its own sake-is either a strong motive or a
strong feeling; it could hardly be so where the natural im-
pulses and the ideal power predominate in so high a degree.
The vehemence with which she ass erts the just and legal
rights of her son is that of a fond mother and a proud-spirited
woman, stung with the sense of injury, and herself a reign-
ing sovereign,-by birth and right, if not in fact; yet
when bereaved of her son, grief not only
"fills the room
up of her absent child," but seems to absorb every other
faculty and feeling-even pride and anger. It is true that
she exults over him as one whom nature and fortune had
destined to be great, but in her distraction for his loss, she
thinks of him only as her "pretty Arthur."

O lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son !
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and iny sorrows' cure!

No other feeling can be traced through the whole of her frantic scene-it is grief only, a mother's heart-rending, soul-absorbing grief, and nothing else. Not even indignation, or the desire of revenge, interfere with its soleness and intensity. An ambitious woman would hardly have thus addressed the cold, wily Cardinal;

And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say,

That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again;

For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost;
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit:
And so he'll die; and, rising so again,

When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more!

The bewildered pathos and poetry of this address could be natural in no woman, who did not unite, like Constance, the most passionate sensibility with the most vivid imagination.

It is true that Queen Elinor calls her on one occasion, "ambitious Constance," but the epithet is rather the natural expression of Elinor's own fear and hatred than really applicable. Elinor, in whom age had subdued all passions but ambition, dreaded the mother of Arthur as her rival in power, and for that reason only opposed the claims of the son. But I conceive, that in a woman yet in the prime of life, and endued with the peculiar disposition of Constance, the mere love of power would be too much modified by fancy and feeling to be called a passion.

**

In fact, it is not pride, nor temper nor ambition, nor even maternal affection which in Constance gives the prevailing tone to the whole character-it is the predominance of the imagination. I do not mean in the conception of the dramatic portrait, but in the temperament of the woman herself. In the poetical, fanciful, excitable cast of her mind

* "Queen Elinor saw that if he were king, how his mother Constance would look to bear the most rule in the realm of England, till her son should come to a lawful age to govern of himself.”— HOLINSHED.

in the excess of the ideal power, tinging all her affections, exalting all her sentiments and thoughts, and animating the expression of both, Constance can only be compared to Juliet.

In the first place, it is through the power of imagination that when under the influence of excited temper, Constance is not a mere incensed woman; nor does she, in the style of Volumnia, “lament in anger Juno-like,” but rather like a sybil in a fury. Her sarcasms come down like thunderbolts. In her famous address to Austria—

O Lymoges! O Austria! thou dost shame

That bloody spoil, thou slave! thou wretch! thou coward! &c. it is as if she had concentrated the burning spirit of scorn, and dashed it in his face-every word seems to blister where it falls. In the scolding scene between her and Queen Elinor, the laconic insolence of the latter is completely overborne by the torrent of bitter contumely which bursts from the lips of Constance, clothed in the 'most energetic, and often in the most figurative expressions.

ELINOR.

Who's it that thou dost call usurper-France?

CONSTANCE.

Let me make answer-Thy usurping son.

ELINOR.

Out, insolent! thy bastard shall be king,

That thou may'st be a queen, and check the world!
CONSTANCE.

My bed was ever to thy son as true,

As thine was to thy husband; and this boy
Liker in feature to his father Geoffrey,

Than thou and John in manners: being as like
As rain to water, or devil to his dam.
My boy a bastard! by my soul, I think
His father never was so true begot;
It cannot be and if thou wert his mothe

ELINOR.

There's a good mother, boy that blots thy father.

CONSTANCE.

There's a good grandam, boy that would blot thee.

Do, child, go to its grandam, child;
Give grandam kingdom, and its grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig-

There's a good grandam.

ARTHUR.

Good, my mother, peace.

I would that I were low laid in my grave;
I am not worth this coil that's made for me.

ELINOR.

His mother shames him so, poor boy, he weeps.

CONSTANCE.

Now shame upon you, whe'r she does or no!
His grandam's wrongs, and not his mother's shame,
Draw those heaven-moving pearls from his poor eyes,
Which heaven shall take in nature of a fee-

Ay, with these chrystal beads heav'n shall be bribed
To do him justice, and revenge on you.

ELINOR.

Thou monstrous slanderer of heaven and earth.

CONSTANCE.

Thou monstrous injurer of heaven and earth,
Call me not slanderer; thou and thine usurp
The dominations, royalties and rights

Of this oppressed boy. This is thy eldest son's son
Unfortunate in nothing but in thee.