.

Lastly, Queen Isabella's blessing, spoken over King Henry V and his
French bride, predicts an enduring friendship between England and
France:

As man and wife, being two, are one in love,
So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal,
That never may ill office, or fell jealousy,
Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage,
Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms,
To make divorce of their incorporate league;
That English may as French, French Englishmen,
Receive each other! God speak this Amen!

One of the delights of a literature as rich and as old as ours is that
at every step we take backwards we find ourselves again. We are
delivered from that foolish vein of thought, so dear to ignorant
conceit, which degrades the past in order to exalt the present and the
future. It is easy to feel ourselves superior to men who no longer
breathe and walk, and whom we do not trouble to understand. Here is the
real benefit of scholarship; it reduces men to kinship with their race.
Science, pressing forward, and beating against the bars which guard the
secrets of the future, has no such sympathy in its gift.

Anyhow, in Shakespeare's time, England was already old England; which if
she could ever cease to be, she might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, but
would not be England at all. What Shakespeare and his fellows of the
sixteenth century gave her was a new self-consciousness and a new
self-confidence. They foraged in the past; they recognized themselves in
their ancestors; they found feudal England, which had existed for many
hundreds of years, a dumb thing; and when she did not know her own
meaning, they endowed her purposes with words. They gave her a new
delight in herself, a new sense of power and exhilaration, which has
remained with her to this day, surviving all the airy philosophic
theories of humanity which thought to supersede the old solid national
temper. The English national temper is better fitted for traffic with
the world than any mere doctrine can ever be, for it is marked by an
immense tolerance. And this, too, Shakespeare has expressed. Falstaff is
perhaps the most tolerant man who was ever made in God's image. But it
is rather late in the day to introduce Falstaff to an English audience.
Perhaps you will let me modernize a brief scene from Shakespeare,
altering nothing essential, to illustrate how completely his spirit is
the spirit of our troops in Flanders and France.

A small