the treacheries of the reign. Just as the play
of _Richard III_ completes the action of the Wars of the Roses, this
play completes the action of the killing of the Duke of Gloucester at
Calais. The wheel comes full circle, crushing many that looked to be
brought high, making friends enemies and enemies friends. Life was
never so brooded on since man learned to think, as in this cycle of
tragedies. In this fragment of the whole we are shown the two classes in
human life, the people of instinct and the people of intellect, being
preyed on by two men, one of them greedy for present ease, the other for
temporal power. Both men obtain their will. Those who give up everything
for one thing often obtain that thing. But it is a law of life that
nothing must be paid for with too great a share of the imaginative
energy. All excess of the kind is unjust, as violence must be, and
offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. King Henry IV
fails in the hour of his triumph from his manifold failures in life
during the struggle for triumph. Falstaff fails in the same way. The
prize of life falls to the careless and callous man who has struggled
only in two minutes of his life, once, when he played a practical joke
upon some thieves, and a second time when he killed Hotspur, the
brilliant intellect, the "miracle of men."

Many scenes in this play are great. Shakespeare's instinctive power was
as large and as happy as his intellectual power. In this play he
indulged it to the full. The Falstaff scenes are all wonderful. That in
which the drunken Pistol is driven downstairs is the finest tavern scene
ever written. Those placed in Gloucestershire are the perfect poetry of
English country life. The talk of old dead Double, who could clap "i'
the clout at twelvescore," and is now dead, as we shall all be soon; the
casting back of memory to Jane Nightwork, still alive, though she
belongs to a time fifty-five years past, when a man, now old, heard the
chimes at midnight; the order to sow the headland, Cotswold fashion,
with red Lammas wheat; the kindness and charm of the country servants,
so beautiful after the drunken townsmen, are like the English country
speaking. The earth of England is a good earth and bears good fruit,
even the apple of man. These scenes are like an apple-loft in some old
barn, where the apples of last year lie sweet in the straw.

All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness
of an i