r chance because his
friends are too wise to advise desperate measures. Nevertheless, his
troops shake the King's troops. The desperate battle of Shrewsbury is
very nearly a triumph for him. Then the Prince meets him and kills him.
He learns too late that a passionate longing to right the wrong goes
down before the rough and stupid something that makes up the bulk of the
world. He learns that

"Thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop"--

and dies. The man who kills him says a few trite lines over his body,
and leaves the stage talking of Falstaff's bowels.

Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V, has been famous for many years as
"Shakespeare's only hero." Shakespeare was too wise to count any man a
hero. The ways of fate moved him to vision, not heroism. If we can be
sure of anything in that great, simple, gentle, elusive brain, we can be
sure that it was quickened by the thought of the sun shining on the just
and on the unjust, and shining none the less golden though the soul like
clay triumph over the soul like flame. Prince Henry is not a hero, he is
not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose
incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever
interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous
though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's
throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks
continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the
society of his choice his attitude is remote and cold-blooded. There is
no good-fellowship in him, no sincerity, no whole-heartedness. He makes
a mock of the drawer who gives him his whole little pennyworth of sugar.
His jokes upon Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon
his princehood whenever the old man would retort upon him. He impresses
one as quite common, quite selfish, quite without feeling. When he
learns that his behaviour may have lost him his prospective crown he
passes a sponge over his past, and fights like a wild cat for the right
of not having to work for a living.

There is little great poetry in the play. The magnificent image--

"Baited like eagles having lately bathed"--

the speech of Worcester (in Act V, sc. i) when he comes with a trumpet
to speak with the King, and the call of Hotspur to set on battle--

"Sound all the lofty instr