he rest is
the work of at least two mechanical (sometimes muddy) minds, who neither
criticised nor understood, but had some sense of the pageant. There are
bright marks in the play where Shakespeare's mind touched it.

"Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to nought."

"If underneath the standard of the French
She carry armour."

"Now thou art come unto a feast of death."

"Thus, while the vulture of sedition
Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders,
Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss
The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror,
That ever-living man of memory,
Henry the Fifth."

The work as a whole is one of the old formless chronicle plays, which
inspired the remark that if an English dramatist were to make a play of
St. George he would begin with the birth of the Dragon. In Act II
Shakespeare's mind both directs and explains the welter. The scene in
the Temple Gardens, where the men of the two factions pluck the red and
white roses, is like music after discord. The play is lifted into
poetry. The big tragic purpose broods; something fateful quickens. The
next scene, where Mortimer dies in prison, is another instance of the
power of great intellect to give life. The dying Mortimer is carried in,
to show how the imminent tragedy has been for long years preparing, in
countless passionate men, each of whom has shaped it, little by little,
out of lust and hate, till the spiritual measure tips towards justice.

The only other scenes that bear marks of Shakespeare's mind are those
in Act IV, in which Talbot meets his death. The verse of these scenes is
often careless, but it has a bright variety, pleasant to the mind after
the strutting verse (wearily reiterating one prosodic effect, like
choppy water) of the other authors. Some people claim that Shakespeare
wrote the whole of this play. The intellect changes much in life; but
never in kind, only in degree. Shakespeare's mind could play with dirt
and relish dirt, but it was never base and never blunt. The base mind is
betrayed by its conceptions, not by its amusements. Shakespeare's mind
could never, at any stage of his career, have sunk to conceive the
disgusting scene in which Joan of Arc pleads. Nor could he at any time
have planned a play in which the moral idea is a trapping to physical
action.

_King Henry VI, Part II._