ly destroyed
the dramatic interest of the situation;--and what a situation! One more
magnificent was never placed before the mind's eye than that of
Constance, when, deserted and betrayed, she stands alone in her despair,
amid her false friends and her ruthless enemies![88] The image of the
mother-eagle, wounded and bleeding to death, yet stretched over her
young in an attitude of defiance, while all the baser birds of prey are
clamoring around her eyry, gives but a faint idea of the moral sublimity
of this scene. Considered merely as a poetical or dramatic picture, the
grouping is wonderfully fine; on one side, the vulture ambition of that
mean-souled tyrant, John; on the other, the selfish, calculating policy
of Philip: between them, balancing their passions in his hand, the cold,
subtle, heartless Legate: the fiery, reckless Falconbridge; the princely
Louis; the still unconquered spirit of that wrangling queen, old Elinor;
the bridal loveliness and modesty of Blanche; the boyish grace and
innocence of young Arthur; and Constance in the midst of them, in all
the state of her great grief, a grand impersonation of pride and
passion, helpless at once and desperate,--form an assemblage of figures,
each perfect in its kind, and, taken all together, not surpassed for the
variety, force, and splendor of the dramatic and picturesque effect.

QUEEN ELINOR.

Elinor of Guienne, and Blanche of Castile, who form part of the group
around Constance, are sketches merely, but they are strictly historical
portraits, and full of truth and spirit.

At the period when Shakspeare has brought these three women on the scene
together, Elinor of Guienne (the daughter of the last Duke of Guienne
and Aquitaine, and like Constance, the heiress of a sovereign duchy) was
near the close of her long, various, and unquiet life--she was nearly
seventy: and, as in early youth, her violent passions had overborne both
principle and policy, so in her old age we see the same character, only
modified by time; her strong intellect and love of power, unbridled by
conscience or principle, surviving when other passions were
extinguished, and rendered more dangerous by a degree of subtlety and
self-command to which her youth had been a stranger. Her personal and
avowed hatred for Constance, together with its motives, are mentioned by
the old historians. Holinshed expressly says, that Queen Elinor was
mightily set against her grandson Arthur, rather moved ther