in youth, and freely sharing in the rough debaucheries of the metropolis. The same vigor "that did affright the air at Agincourt" must have marked his conduct and bearing in any tumult in which he happened to be engaged. I do not know on what credible authority the story of his having given Gascoigne a box on the ear for committing one of his friends to prison may rest, and shall not at present take the trouble of inquiring.* It *. In Knight's Illustrated Shakespeare there is a notice of, with extracts from, an old play, called "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth," which was on the stage when Shakespeare wrote, and, probably, supplied him with the subject of the principal dramas in which Falstaff and the Prince more prominently appear. In the old play the Prince is committed, by the LordMayor, to the counter (the Compter, even yet a prison in London), for rioting in the City, but escapes and enters the court where the Chief-Justice is sitting in judgment on Gadshill, the Prince's man, who robbed the carrier. The Judge threatens to hang the knave, and on his continued refusal to release him, gets a box on the ear from the Prince, who is at once committed to the Fleet Prison for "contempt" and the assault. In King Henry the Fourth, Part II. (Act I. Scene 2), Shakespeare makes Falstaff's page speak of the Lord-Chief-Justice, as "the nobleman that committed the prince for striking him about Bardolph." In Act V. Scene 2, is recorded the truly noble manner in which the Prince, then newly succeeded to the Crown, displays moderation and magnanimity in thanking, instead of hostilely remembering, the judge for his independent conduct. As to the actual fact of such an incident, the authorities are at variance. Hollinshed, the historian, from whom Shakespeare drew largely, records the circumstance of the Prince's insolence and his commitment to prison. So docs Hall, and so (more minutely still) does Sir Thomas Elyot, in his book of political ethics, called, "The Governeur." None of them mention the after conduct of the Prince. On the other hand, several commentators and critics deny the historical fact. Several add, that Chief-Justice Gascoigne died in the lifetime of Henry IV., so that Prince Henry, as King, could not have made the amende, as recorded in the drama. Others allege that Gascoigne survived, but was not re-appointed. Stowe declares that Gascoigne was Chief-Justice from the sixth of Henry IV. to the third of Henry V. Mr. Verplanck refers to an American author (George Gibbs, of New York), whose "Judicial Chronicle," published in 1834, contains an exact chronological list of the earlier English judges of the higher courts of England and America, in which Gascoigne is mentioned as having died or retired in 1414, the second year of Henry V. It is not probable that Shakespeare, who generally adhered to historical truth, invented what has been called "the fine lesson of political magnanimity to a personal adversary," so spiritedly given in King Henry the Fourth, Part II. - M. is highly probable that the chief justice amply deserved the cuffing, and I shall always assume the liberty of doubting that he committed the prince. That, like a "sensible lord," he should have hastened to accept any apology which should have relieved him from a collision with the ruling powers of court, I have no doubt at all, from a long consideration of the conduct and history of chief justices in general. More diligent searchers into the facts of that obscure time have seen reason to disbelieve the stories of any serious dissipations of Henry. Engaged as he was from his earliest youth in affairs of great importance, and with a mind trained to the prospect of powerfully acting in the most serious questions that could agitate his time-a disputed succession, a rising hostility to the church, divided nobility, turbulent commons, an internecine war with France impossible of avoidance, a web of European diplomacy just then beginning to develop itself, in consequence of the spreading use of the pen and ink-horn so pathetically deplored by Jack Cade, and forerunning the felonious invention, "contrary to the king's crown and dignity," of the printing-press, denounced with no regard to chronology by that illustrious agitator;-in these circumstances, the heir of the house of Lancaster, the antagonist of the Lollards-a matter of accident in his case, though contrary to the general principles of his family-and at the same time suspected by the churchmen of dangerous designs against their property-the pretender on dubious title, but not at the period appearing so decidedly defective as it seems in ours, to the throne of France -the aspirant to be arbiter or master of all that he knew of Europe-could not have wasted all his youth in riotous living.* In fact, his historical character is stern and severe; but with that we have here nothing to do. It is not the Henry of *Shakespeare derived his idea of Prince Henry's wild youth from Hollinshed, Hall, and other historians, as well as from tradition.—M. battles, and treaties, and charters, and commissions, and parliaments, we are now dealing with ;· -we look to the Henry of Shakespeare. That Henry, I repeat, is subject and vassal of Falstaff. He is bound by the necromancy of genius to the "white-bearded Satan," who he feels is leading him to perdition. It is in vain that he thinks it utterly unfitting that he should engage in such an enterprise as the robbery at Gadshill; for, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, he joins the expedition merely to see how his master will get through his difficulty. He struggles hard, but to no purpose. Go he must, and he goes accordingly. A sense of decorum keeps him from participating in the actual robbery; but he stands close by, that his resistless sword may aid the dubious valor of his master's associates. Joining with Poins in the jest of scattering them and seizing their booty, not only is no harm done to Falstaff, but a sense of remorse seizes on the prince for the almost treasonable deeds "Falstaff sweats to death, And lards the lean earth as he walks along; At their next meeting, after detecting and exposing the stories related by the knight, how different is the result from what had been predicted by Poins when laying the plot! "The virtue of this jest will be, the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper: how thirty, at least, he fought with; what wards, what blows, what extremities he endured; and in the reproof of this lies the jest." Reproof indeed! All is detected and confessed. Does Poins reprove him, interpret the word as we will? Poins indeed! That were lèze majesté. Does the prince? Why, he tries a jest, but it breaks down; and Falstaff victoriously orders sack and merriment with an accent of command not to be disputed. In a moment after he is selected to meet Sir John Bracy, sent special with the villanous news of the insurrection of the Percies; and in another moment he is seated on his joint-stool, the mimic King of England, lecturing with a mixture of jest and earnest the real Prince of Wales. Equally inevitable is the necessity of screening the master from the consequence of his deliquencies, even at the expense of a very close approximation to saying the thing that is not; and impossible does Hal find it not to stand rebuked when the conclusion of his joke of taking the tavern-bills from the sleeper behind the arras is the enforced confession of being a pickpocket. Before the austere king his father, John his soberblooded brother, and other persons of gravity or consideration, if Falstaff be in presence, the prince is constrained by his star to act in defence and protection of the knight. Conscious of the carelessness and corruption which mark all the acts of his guide, philosopher, and friend, it is yet impossible that he should not recommend him to a command in a civil war which jeoparded the very existence of his dynasty. In the heat of the battle and the exultation of victory he is obliged to yield to the fraud that represents Falstaff as the actual slayer of Hotspur. Prince John quietly remarks, that the tale of Falstaff is the strangest that he ever heard his brother, who has won the victory, is content with saying that he who has told it is the strangest of fellows. Does he betray the cheat? Certainly not-it would have been an act of disobedience; but in privy council he suggests to his prince in a whisper, 66 : Come, bring your luggage [the body of Hotspur] nobly—” nobly-as becomes your rank in our court, so as to do the whole of your followers, myself included, honor by the appearance of their master "Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back; For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have." Tribute, this, from the future Henry V.! Deeper tribute, however, is paid in the scene in which state necessity induces the renunciation of the fellow with the great belly who had misled him. Poins had prepared us for the issue. The prince had been grossly abused in the reputable hostelrie of the Boar's Head while he was thought to be out of hearing. When he comes forward with the intention of rebuking the impertinence, Poins, well knowing the command to which he was destined to submit, exclaims: "My lord, he will drive you out of your revenge, and turn all to merriment, if you take not the heat." Vain caution! The scene, again, ends by the total forgetfulness of Falstaff's offence, and his being sent for to court. When, therefore, the time had come that considerations of the highest importance required that Henry should assume a more dignified character, and shake off his dissolute companions, his own experience and the caution of Poins instruct him that if the thing be not done on the heat-if the old master-spirit be allowed one moment's ground of vantage-the game is up, the good resolutions dissipated into thin air, the grave rebuke turned all into laughter, and thoughts of anger or prudence put to flight by the restored supremacy of Falstaff. Unabashed and unterrified he has heard the severe rebuke of the king :-"I know thee not, old man," &c., until an opportunity offers for a repartee: "Know, the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men." Some joke on the oft-repeated theme of his unwieldy figure was twinkling in Falstaff's eye, and ready to leap from his tongue. The king saw his danger: had he allowed a word, he was undone. Hastily, therefore, does he check that word : "Reply not to me with a fool-born jest ;" forbidding, by an act of eager authority-what he must also have felt to be an act of self-control-the outpouring of those magic sounds which, if uttered, would, instead of a prison be |