Falstaff, the companion of his roaring youth, cannot easily win pardon.

It is as a soldier and an officer that Henry's character rises to its full height. He is not merely brave in fight and prudent in strategy, he is always cheery and frank in speech to friend and foe, and possesses a rare gift "to encourage" his men in seasons of danger and difficulty by virtue of his power of eloquent and stirring utterance. His nerve never fails him in the field, yet he is so “free from vainness and self-glorious pride," that he declines to allow his bruised helmet and his bended sword to be paraded before him on his triumphal entry into London after the victory. Similarly, he is fully conscious of the horrors of war and the duty of rulers to aim at the preservation of the peace. The sword, which must always spill guiltless blood, ought never to leave its sheath except at the bidding of "right and conscience.” Mindful of "the widows' tears, the orphans' cries," he conducts war with such humanity as is practicable. He forbids looting, he forbids the use of insulting language to the enemy. One of his own soldiers who robs a church on the march is promptly hanged. "When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester," he says, "is the soonest winner." Nevertheless the sternness that lurks in his nature can render him "terrible in resolution." There must be no luke-warmness, no weakness, no vacillation in the practical handling of a campaign. When the time comes for striking blows, they must be struck with all the force and fury of which the strikers are capable.

In

peace there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility.

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger.

With desperate severity he retaliates on the enemy as soon as they infringe the fair rules of war. He gives

no quarter when his antagonist declines to face the fact of irretrievable defeat.

What is it then to me if impious war,

Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?

Humanity demands, at every hazard, a prompt closing of a conflict when its issue is no longer in doubt.

Broadly speaking, Shakespeare has in no other play cast a man so entirely in the heroic mould as King Henry. Such failings as are indicated are kept in the background. On his virtues alone a full blaze of light is shed. Flawless heroines Shakespeare has depicted in plenty, but Henry is his only male character who, when drawn at full length, betrays no crucial or invincible defect of will, or mind, or temper. The Bastard in King John" approaches him most closely in heroic stature, but the Bastard is not drawn at full length. Certainly no other of Shakespeare's monarchs is comparable with Henry V. In the rest of his English historical plays he tells sad stories of the deaths of the kings, who are ruined mainly by moral flaws in their character. "Richard II.," "Richard III.," "King John," even

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Henry IV.," illustrate the unworthiness of those who thirst for kingly glory, the brittleness rather than the brilliance of the royal estate. Only Henry V. proves himself deserving of truly royal prosperity, of which the last scene of the play seems to guarantee him lasting enjoyment. Alone in Shakespeare's gallery of English monarchs does Henry's portrait evoke at once a joyous sense of satisfaction in the high potentialities of human character and a sense of pride among Englishmen that a man of his mettle is of English race.

The princes and noblemen who are Henry's companions in arms are lightly sketched. They are credited with courage resembling his own, but are without his resolute nerve, his initiative, or his cheerfulness. His French foes are not distinctly individualised. The King of France feebly vacillates; the Dauphin overflows with the vivacity and boastfulness of impetuous youth; the Constable evinces more fitting sense of responsibility; the French Princess is innocently coquettish; but no French man or woman is a very substantial creation.

Apart from the English King, it is among the English characters of comparatively low military rank that Shakespeare's sure power of characterisation is discernible. Especially has he bestowed care on the Welsh captain, Fluellen. A first-rate officer, he is at the same time an amusing pedant, who is invariably anxious to air his reading in the military history of the ancients, and to correct his companions' errors on that and other subjects. Shakespeare never permits us to forget his nationality. His very name is a jesting misspelling of the Welsh

name Llewellyn, and his dialect ridicules without offence the Welsh mode of pronouncing the king's English. Fluellen is proud of his king, whom he claims as a fellow-countryman, but his loyalty has no touch of servility. Hot as gunpowder when he is affronted, he does not hastily provoke a brawl, and, even when avenging himself on the bully Pistol for his insult to the Welsh emblem of the leek, he administers punishment with an engaging coolness. With grim humour, too, he finally bestows a groat on the discomfited braggart wherewith to salve his broken pate.

Hardly less attractive is the sketch of the private soldier Williams, whose loyalty and courage are never in question, although he is ready, in confidential talk with a comrade, to criticise the motives and the actions of his superior officers, and is prone to exaggerate the griefs incident to his profession. Bates, Williams's friend in the ranks, is of greater sagacity and sanguineness. He has abundant stores of common-sense and humanity

qualities with which few of his companions in camp are conspicuously endowed. At an epoch when Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were cut off from England by very sturdy barriers, both sentimental and material, which have long since disappeared, Shakespeare, prophetically, and in defiance of contemporary facts, introduces not only Welshmen, but Scotchmen and Irishmen fighting shoulder to shoulder with the English, under the leadership of an English general. The Scot, Jamy, though a conscientious soldier, is stolid and undemonstrative. The Irishman, Macmorris, is sensitive and

irascible. Inevitable bickerings arise among the men of various nationalities. Only the sagacious and humane Englishman Bates, in the lower ranks of the English army, proves himself fully equal to the situation. He reproves internal discord in the memorable words: "Be friends, you English fools, be friends. We have French quarrels enow, if you could tell how to reckon." Bates teaches a lesson of perennial authority.

And at the lowest end of the scale of humanity to which the play descends stand those "most vile and ragged foils," those "ale-washed wits," those "sworn brothers in filching," Pistol, Nym, Bardolf, with Mistress Quickly and the candid and witty Boy, who is destitute even of a name, in attendance upon them. The disreputable crew brings by ironical contrast into bold relief the heroic virtues of those with whom the war associates them. Although Pistol and his companions assume titles of military rank, they are mere camp-followers of the army. Nym (the cant word for "steal") is called a corporal, Bardolf a lieutenant, and Pistol an "ancient" (a popular mispronunciation of ensign), but such titles were no more than mocking colloquial honours. Each member of the eccentric trio is a ridiculous rogue, brawling, drinking, stealing, until his sins cut him off for ever. Bardolf, whose red nose, a constant theme of jest with his companions, especially excites the jeers of the irrepressible Boy, is appropriately hanged for robbing a church on the march to Agincourt. The taciturn and eccentric-spoken Nym comes to a like humiliating end. The unlucky Boy is killed in battle by the French.