INTRODUCTORY
REMARKS.

AD the author of this and of the following play designed (as, there can be little doubt, it was far from his intention) to depict, not only the horror, but the barbarity of civil war-to expose to the execration of his countrymen the ruthlessness of low worldly ambition, he could not more effectually have answered the end he proposed to himself than is apparent in these productions. Let him call them, as he has done, "The Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster;" let him tell us that here is a true history of that contention (and, making allowance for some not important anachronisms, it is so)-yet, that mends not the matter, nor mitigates the disgust and loathing with which every reader must behold the infamous wickedness that stalks with bold and unabashed front across the bloody stage, wearing, as it may chance the red rose or the white, each equally, long ere the end be known, "like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe."

That the author, however, had no other intention, when he sat down to the composition of these plays, than to set forth in a striking dramatic form a history of that portentous and ignoble struggle, is partly evident. With tolerable fidelity has he furnished his scene; with historical truth has he presented his personages. He has told his hideous story well and plainly; but he left it-at all events, it was left to the spectator then, to the reader since, to supply the moral for himself.

It may be doubted whether the poet's young and heated fancy, having to deal with gross but dazzling secular greatness in the form of princes and of peers, was not infected by the monstrous delusions, and for the time controlled to an acknowledgment of their high-sounding and (so called) heroic pretensions. How else are we to account for the introduction of Jack Cade and his followers, or, rather, for the spirit in which the author has introduced them? It is no uncommon thing, in modern times, to ascribe to the leaders of popular changes motives and designs not a whit less extravagant than those of which Cade so openly speaks, and it may be true that that doughty clothier and his ignorant adherents were arrant levellers; but where is the art of introducing them here, where the extravagance of their intentions can cause no laughter, and the violence of their acts can scarcely excite our abhorrence? We, indeed, deplore the murder of Lord Say by these poor wretches, but we pity their ignorance the while; nor can all the ridicule and contempt the author strives to heap upon them make them ridiculous or contemptible. On the contrary, "weak masters though they be," they come upon the scene like blind avengers of their outraged country; their wild determinations not so much the offspring of their vicious wills, as the uncouth progeny engendered from their oppression. They are one of the extremes of the two that meet. As the wrong, so the remedy-a wrong likewise. They should have paused when the Lord Say told them (it is finely said)

"Ignorance is the curse of God; ]

Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven."

but they might well doubt him when they saw no pinion raised heaven-ward.

The following play is fuller of personages than of characters. Clifford and his son have their counterparts in Salisbury and his son Warwick. The Dukes of Buckingham and Somerset are like each other, nor unlike the former four; and Suffolk is only to be distinguished from these by the circumstances of his fortune. Richard Plantagenet is bold, unscrupulous, and ambitious, as his son and namesake was after him; but the dawning, or, rather, lowering character of Crookback is, in this play, slightly, but skilfully, touched. Cardinal Beaufort is a powerful sketch which the older Shakspere would have grandly painted; and Humphrey, Duke of Gloster, seems to be more a character than he is, being the only prominent personage in the play (except the King) who has any amiable quality about him. There is scarcely anything more affecting in dramatic literature (it could not choose but be so) than the character of Henry VI. Meek, not effeminate; patient, not imbecile; pious, without bigotry; this almost divine being claims the reader's reverential sympathy. Of Queen Margaret it will be time to speak in our remarks upon the succeeding play.

There is dramatic fire in this play enough to stock how many dramatists of modern times. Warwick's description of the murdered Gloster is frightfully striking; and the scene in which Queen Margaret chides Suffolk for refusing to curse his enemies, and entreats him to cease when he is in the mid career of cursing is wonderfully true to nature. The death of Cardinal Beaufort is too celebrated to be dwelt upon. No man but Shakspere would have been contented to make the scene so brief. It was no small part of his greatness to know when to refrain.