Loather a hundred times to part than die:

Yet now farewell; and farewell life with thee!

which is followed by that beautiful and intense burst of passion from Suffolk

"Tis not the hand I care for, wert thou hence;

A wilderness is populous enough,

So Suffolk had thy heavenly company:

For where thou art, there is the world itself,
With every several pleasure in the world;
And where thou art not, desolation!

In the third part of Henry the Sixth, Margaret, engaged in the terrible struggle for her husband's throne, appears to rather more advantage. The indignation against Henry, who had pitifully yielded his son's birthright for the privilege of reigning unmolested during his own life, is worthy of her, and gives rise to a beautiful speech. We are here inclined to sympathize with her; but soon after follows the murder of the Duke of York; and the base revengeful spirit and atrocious cruelty with which she insults over him, unarmed and a prisoner, the bitterness of her mockery, and the unwomanly malignity with which she presents him with the napkin stained with the blood of his youngest son, and "bids the father wipe his eyes withal," turn all our sympathy into aversion and horror. York replies in the celebrated speech, beginning

She-wolf of France, and worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth-

and taunts her with the poverty of her father, the most irritating topic he could have chosen.

Hath that poor monarch taught thee to insult?
It needs not, nor it boots thee not, proud queen,
Unless the adage must be verified,
That beggars, mounted, ride their horse to death.
"Tis beauty, that doth oft make women proud;

By such a woman as Margaret is here depicted such a speech could be answered only in one way with her dagger's point-and thus she answers it.

It is some comfort to reflect that this trait of ferocity is not historical: the body of the Duke of York was found, after the battle, among the heaps of slain, and his head struck off: but even this was not done by the command of Margaret.

In another passage, the truth, and consistency of the character of Margaret are sacrificed to the march of the dramatic action, with a very ill effect. When her fortunes were at the very lowest ebb, and she had sought refuge in the court of the French king, Warwick, her most formidable enemy, upon some disgust he had taken against Edward the Fourth, offered to espouse her cause; and proposed a match between the prince her son and his daughter Anne of Warwick-the "gentle Lady Anne," who figures in Richard the Third. In the play, Margaret embraces the offer without a moment's hesitation:* we are disgusted by her versatile policy, and a meanness of spirit in no way allied to the magnanimous forgiveness of her terrible adversary. The Margaret of history sternly resisted this degrading expedient. She could not,

*See Henry VI., Part III., Act. iii., sc. 3

QUEEN MARGARET,

Warwick, these words have turned my hate to love:
And I forgive and quite forget old faulst,

And joy, that thou becom'st King Henry's friend.

she said, pardon from her heart the man who had been the primary cause of all her misfortunes. She mistrusted Warwick, despised him for the motives of his revolt from Edward, and considered that to match her son into the family of her enemy from mere policy, was a species of degradation. It took Louis the Eleventh, with all his art and eloquence, fifteen days to wring a reluctant consent, accompanied with tears, from this high-hearted

woman.

The speech of Margaret to her council of generals before the battle of Tewkesbury (Act v., scene 5), is as remarkable a specimen of false rhetoric, as her address to the soldiers on the eve of the fight, is of true and passionate eloquence.

She witnesses the final defeat of her army, the massacre of her adherents, and the murder of her son; and though the savage Richard would willingly have put an end to her misery, and exclaims very pertinently—

Why should she live to fill the world with words?

she is dragged forth unharmed, a woful spectacle of extreme wretchedness, to which death would have been an undeserved relief. If we compare the clamorous and loud exclaims of Margaret after the slaughter of her son, to the ravings of Constance, we shall perceive where Shakspeare's genius did not preside, and where it did. Margaret, in bold defiance of history, but with fine dramatic effect, is introduced again in the gorgeous and polluted court of Edward the Fourth. There she stalks around the seat of her former greatness, like a terrible phantom of departed majesty, uncrowned, unsceptred, desolate, powerless-or like a vampire thirsting for blood-or like a grim prophetess of evil, imprecating that ruin on the head of her enemies which she lives to see realized. The scene following the murder of the princes in the Tower, in which Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York sit down on the ground bewailing their desolation, and Margaret suddenly appears from behind them, like the very personification of woe, and seats herself beside them revelling in their despair, is, in the general conception and effect, grand and appalling.

THE DUCHESS.

O, Harry's wife, triumph not in my woes;
God witness with me, I have wept for thine!

QUEEN MARGARET.

Bear with me, I am hungry for revenge,

And now I cloy me with beholding it.
Thy Edward he is dead, that kill'd my Edward;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward:
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Match not the high perfection of my less.

Thy Clarence he is dead, that stabb'd my Edward;
And the beholders of this tragic play,

The adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey,
Untimely smother'd in their dusky graves.
Richard yet lives, hell's black intelligencer,

Only reserv'd their factor, to buy souls

And send them thither. But at hand, at hand,

Ensues his piteous and unpitied end;

Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar for him; saints pray

To have him suddenly convey'd from hence.

Cancel his bond of life, dear god, I pray,

That I may live to say, The dog is dead.*

She should have stopped here; but the effect thus powerfully excited is marred and weakened by so much superfluous rhetoric, that we are tempted to exclaim with the old Duchess of York

Why should calamity be full of words?

Horace Walpole observes, that "it is evident from the conduct of Shakspeare, that the house of Tudor retained all their Lancasterian prejudices even in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In his play of Richard the Third, he seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the curses which Queen Margaret had vented against them; and he could not give that weight to her curses, without supposing a right in her to utter them."

QUEEN KATHERINE OF ARRAGON.

To have a just idea of the accuracy and beauty of this historical portrait, we ought to bring immediately before us those circumstances of Katherine's life and times, and those parts of her character, which belong to a period previous to the opening of the play. We shall then be better able to appreciate the skill with which Shakspeare has applied the materials before him.

Katherine of Arragon, the fourth and youngest daughter of Ferdinand king of Arragon, and Isabella of Castile, was born at Alcala, whither her mother had retired to winter after one of the most terrible campaigns of the Moorish war-that of 1485.

Katherine had derived from nature no dazzling qualities of mind, and no striking advantages of person. She inherited a tincture of Queen Isabella's haughtiness and obstinacy of temper, but neither her beauty nor her splendid talents. Her education under the direction of that extraordinary mother, had implanted in her mind the most austere principles of virtue, the highest ideas of female decorum, the most narrow and bigoted attachment to the forms of religion, and that excessive pride of birth and rank which distinguished so particularly her family and her nation. In other respects, her understanding was strong, and her judgment clear The natural turn of her mind was simple, serious and domestic, and all the impulses of her heart kindly and benevolent. Such was Katherine; such, at least, she appears on a reference to the