b

He prays but faintly, and would be denied ; ↳ We with heart, and soul, and all beside: pray

His weary joints would gladly rise, I know;
Our knees shall kneel till to the ground they
grow:

His prayers are full of false hypocrisy ;
Ours of true zeal and deep integrity.
Our prayers do out-pray his; then let them have
That mercy, which true prayers ought to have.
Boling. Good aunt, stand up.
Duch.

Nay, do not say-stand up;
But pardon, first; and afterwards, stand up.
An if I were thy nurse, thy tongue to teach,
Pardon-should be the first word of thy speech.
I never long'd to hear a word till now;
Say-pardon, king: let pity teach thee how :
The word is short, but not so short as sweet;
No word like pardon for kings' mouths so
meet.

York. Speak it in French, king: say, par

donnez moy.

Duch. Dost thou teach pardon pardon to

b Blair, in his Lectures on Rhetoric, compares this argument to a passage in Cicero, where the orator maintains that the coldness of Marcus Callidius, in making an accusation of an attempt to poison him, was a proof that the charge was false. "An tu, M. Callidi, nisi fingeres, sic ageres?"

c Chopping French. Chopping is here used in the sense of changing, which is derived from cheaping, trafficking. We still say a chopping wind. Malone, we apprehend, mistakes when he explains the word by jabbering. York exhorts the king instead of saying pardon to say pardonnez moy-excuse me. The duchess will have pardon as "tis current in our land." The chopping French-the French which changes the meaning of words-which sets "the word itself against the word," she says, "we do not understand."

I pardon him. Duch.

With all my

heart

A god on earth thou art. Boling. But for our trusty brother-in-law,3 and the abbot,

With all the rest of that consorted crew,
Destruction straight shall dog them at the heis
Good uncle, help to order several powers
To Oxford, or where'er these traitors are:
They shall not live within this world, I swear,
But I will have them, if I once know where.
Uncle, farewell,-and cousin too, adieu :
Your mother well hath pray'd, and prove you

Exton. Didst thou not mark the king, what words he spake ? "Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear? Was it not so ? Serv. Exton. "Have I no friend?" quoth he: he spake it twice.

Those were his very words.

And urg'd it twice together; did he not?
Serv. He did.

Exton. And, speaking it, he wistly look'd on

me;

As who should say,-I would thou wert the

man

a Heaven. This is the last passage of the play in which we have substituted, according to the authority of the folio of 1623, the word Heaven for God. It is to be observed that the editors of the folio have retained the name of the Most High when it is used in a peculiarly emphatic, or reverential manner, and have not made the change to Heaven indiscriminately. The substitution of this word, in most cases, was made in obedience to a statute of James the First; (3 Jac. I. c. 21,) and it appears to us that in many recent instances good taste has not been exercised in restoring the readings of the earliest copies, which were issued at a time when the habits of society sanctioned the habitual and therefore light employment of the Sacred Name. We have no desire to Bowdlerise Shakspere, but, on the other hand, it is desirable to avoid, if possible, giving offence to the serious.

b Wistly. So the old copies. Wistly is constantly used by the writers of Shakspere's time,-by Drayton, for example,

"But when more wistly they did her behold."

And so I am: Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by-and-by,
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing:-But, whate'er I am,
Nor I, nor any man, that but man is,

With nothing shall be pleas'd till he be eas'd
With being nothing. Music do I hear? [Music.
Ha, ha! keep time:-How sour sweet music is,
When time is broke, and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear,
To check time broke in a disorder'd string;
But, for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
For now hath time made me his numb'ring
clock:

world; a

In humours like the people of this world,

For no thought is contented. The better sort,

As thoughts of things divine,-are intermix'd
With scruples, and do set the Word itself
Against the Word ↳

As thus,-Come, little ones; and then again,—
It is as hard to come, as for a camel
To thread the postern of a needle's eye.
Thoughts tending to ambition they do plot
Unlikely wonders: how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls;
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars.
Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame,
That many have, and others must sit there:
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endur'd the like.
Thus play I, in one person, many people,
And none contented: Sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,

This little world. "The little world of man," as in Lear. Shakspere here uses the philosophy which is thus described by Raleigh:-"Because in the little frame of man's body there is a representation of the universal, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts there, therefore was man called microcosmos, or the little world."(History of the World.)

b We give the reading of the first quarto. The folio has "the faith itself against the faith." We must remark that, in the third scene of this Act the Duchess uses precisely the same expression; "That sett'st the word itself against the word:" the sense of the word there being, as will be seen, altogether different.

It is somewhat difficult to follow this reading. Richard says, Time has made him a numbering clock. A clock and a watch were formerly the same instruments; a clock so called because it clicketh-a watch so called because it marks the watches, the ancient divisions of the day. Comparing, then, himself to such an instrument, he says, his thoughts jar-that is, tick their watches on (unto) his eyes, which are the outward part of the instrument-the dial plate on which the hours are numbered,-whereto his finger, the dial's point, is pointing. These analogies may appear forced, and somewhat obscure; but it must be observed that throughout the character of Richard, the poet has made him indulge in those freaks of the imagination which belong to weakness of character. (See Supplementary Notice.)

b Jack o' the clock. An automaton, such as formerly constituted one of the wonders of London, before St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street; but which the ruthless hand of improvement has now swept away.

A strange brooch. The brooch, a valuable ornament, was, it seems, out of fashion in Shakspere's time. In All's Well that Ends Well, we have, "the brooch and the toothpick which wear not now." Love to Richard is, therefore, called a strange brooch, a thing of value out of fashion.

143

When thou wert king; who, travelling towards
York,

With much ado, at length have gotten leave
To look upon my sometimes royal master's face.
O, how it yearn'd my heart, when I beheld,
In London streets that coronation day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary!
That horse that thou so often hast bestrid;
That horse that I so carefully have dress'd!
K. Rich. Rode he on Barbary? Tell me, gen-
tle friend,

How went he under him?

Groom. So proudly as if he had disdain'd the ground.

K. Rich. So proud that Bolingbroke was on

his back!

That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand; This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.

Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down,
(Since pride must have a fall,) and break the neck
Of that proud man that did usurp his back?
Forgiveness, horse! why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be aw'd by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse;
And yet I bear a burden like an ass,
Spur-gall'd, and tir'd by jauncing Bolingbroke.
Enter Keeper, with a dish.

b

[Snatching a weapon, and killing ore. Go thou, and fill another room in hell. [He kills another, then EXTON strikes him down. That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire, That staggers thus my person.-Exton, thy fierce hand

Hath with the king's blood stained the king's own land.

Mount, mount, my soul! thy seat is up on high; Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.

[Dies. Exton. As full of valour as of royal blood: Both have I spilt; O, would the deed were good! For now the devil, that told me I did well,

Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.
This dead king to the living king I'll bear.
Take hence the rest, and give them burial here.

The heads of Brocas, and Sir Bennet Seely;
Two of the dangerous consorted traitors
That sought at Oxford thy dire overthrow.
Boling. Thy pains, Fitzwater, shall not be
forgot;

Right noble is thy merit, well I wot.

Enter PERCY, with the BISHOP OF CARLISLE.

Percy. The grand conspirator, abbot of Westminster,

With clog of conscience and sour melancholy,
Hath yielded up his body to the grave;5
But here is Carlisle living, to abide
Thy kingly doom, and sentence of his pride.

Boling. Carlisle, this is your doom :-
Choose out some secret place, some reverend

room,

More than thou hast, and with it joy thy life;
So, as thou liv'st in peace, die free from strife:
For though mine enemy thou hast ever been,
High sparks of honour in thee have I seen.
Enter EXTON, with Attendants bearing a coffin.
Exton. Great king, within this coffin I present
Thy buried fear; herein all breathless lies

The mightiest of thy greatest enemies,
Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought.
Boling. Exton, I thank thee not; for thou hast
wrought

A deed of slander, with thy fatal hand,
Upon my head, and all this famous land.
Exton. From your own mouth, my lord, did I
this deed.

Boling. They love not poison that do poison need,

Nor do I thee; though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murtherer, love him murthered.
The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labour,
But neither my good word, nor princely favour:
With Cain go wander through the shade of night,
And never shew thy head by day nor light.
Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow :
Come, mourn with me for that I do lament,
And put on sullen black, incontinent;
I'll make a voyage to the Holy land,
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand :-
March sadly after; grace my mourning here,
In weeping after this untimely bier.

[Exeunt.