horoughly carried out at all points and fortified on all
hands to require or even to admit of corroboration; and the attempt to
appropriate any share of the lasting credit which is his due would be
nothing less than a disingenuous impertinence. I may here however notice
that in the very first scene of this trilogy which introduces us to the
ever dear and honoured presence of Sir John, his creator has put into the
mouth of a witness no friendlier or more candid than Ned Poins the
distinction between two as true-bred cowards as ever turned back and one
who will fight no longer than he sees reason. In this nutshell lies the
whole kernel of the matter; the sweet, sound, ripe, toothsome, wholesome
kernel of Falstaff's character and humour. He will fight as well as his
princely patron, and, like the prince, as long as he sees reason; but
neither Hal nor Jack has ever felt any touch of desire to pluck that
"mere scutcheon" honour "from the pale-faced moon." Harry Percy is as it
were the true Sir Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights; Henry V.
is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of those equally daring
and calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect,
and most famous types are Louis XI. and Caesar Borgia. Gain,
"commodity," the principle of self-interest which never but in word and
in jest could become the principle of action with Faulconbridge,--himself
already far more "a man of this world" than a Launcelot or a Hotspur,--is
as evidently the mainspring of Henry's enterprise and life as of the
contract between King Philip and King John. The supple and shameless
egotism of the churchmen on whose political sophistries he relies for
external support is needed rather to varnish his project than to reassure
his conscience. Like Frederic the Great before his first Silesian war,
the future conqueror of Agincourt has practically made up his mind before
he seeks to find as good reason or as plausible excuse as were likewise
to suffice the future conqueror of Rosbach. In a word, Henry is
doubtless not the man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble and
strangely neglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witness
to the actual dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do the
devil's work without his wages; but neither is he, on the like
unprofitable terms, by any manner of means the man to do God's. No
completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant
Englishm