en before, nor
since. An entirely honest, robust, hearty person, contemptuous of the
weak, glad to be a king's bastard, making friends with women (his own
mother one of them) with a trusty, good-humoured frankness, fond of
fighting, extremely able when told what to do, fond of plain
measures--the plainer the better, an honest servant, easily impressed by
intellect when found in high place on his own side, but utterly
incapable of perceiving intellect in a foreigner, fond of those sorts of
humour which generally lead to blows, extremely just, very kind when
not fighting, fond of the words "fair play," and nobly and exquisitely
moved to deep, true poetical feeling by a cruel act done to something
helpless and little. The completeness of the portrait is best seen in
the suggestion of the man's wisdom in affairs. The Bastard is trying to
find out whether Hubert killed Arthur, whose little body lies close
beside them. He says that he suspects Hubert "very grievously." Hubert
protests. The Bastard tests the protest with one sentence: "Go bear him
in thine arms." He utters the commonplace lines--

"I am amaz'd, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of the world"--

while he watches Hubert's face. Hubert stands the test (the emotional
test that none but an Englishman would apply), he picks up the body.
Instantly the Bastard is touched to a tenderness that lifts Hubert to a
spiritual comradeship with him--

"How easy dost thou take all England up."

This tragedy of the death of a child causes nearly all that is nobly
poetical in the play.

All the passionately-felt scenes are about Arthur or his mother. Some
have thought that Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596, shortly after the
death of his little son Hamnet, aged eleven. The supposition accuses
Shakespeare of a want of heart, of a want of imagination, or of both
wants together. He wrote like every other writer, from his sense of what
was fitting in an imagined situation. It was no more necessary for him
to delay the writing of Prince Arthur till his son had died than it was
for Dickens to wait till he had killed a real Little Dorrit by slow
poison.

There is a great change in the manner of the poetical passages. The
poetry of the _Henry VI_ plays is mostly in bright, sweetly running
groups of rhetorical lines. In _King John_ it is either built up
elaborately into an effect of harmony several lines long, or it is put
into a single line or c