HISTORICAL TALES

T:° FROM

3HAKESPEARE

--- .T. Q.UILLER-COUCH

1/6

Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE LIBRARY

1980

HISTORICAL TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

P,Y

A. T. QUILLER- COUGH

ILLUS

LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD

All rights reserved

PREFACE

ALTHOUGH in the following pages I have chosen those plays, or most of them, which Charles and Mary Lamb omitted from their Tales from Shakespeare, and although I have taken a title very like theirs, my attempt has not been to round off or tag a conclusion to their inimitable work. They, as wise judges of what their book should be, found that a certain class of play lay outside their purpose. It is just these plays — the historical ones — which, with a different purpose, are here cast into narrative form.

It appeared to the friend who suggested this book, and to me, that nowhere, in spite of many inaccuracies, can historical pictures be found so vivid or in the main so just as in these historical plays of Shakespeare. We were think ing especially of the plays from English history. But our own experience seemed to show that many young readers fight shy of them, and so miss much which might quicken their interest in history and their early patriotism, being deterred perhaps by the dramatic form and partly by the sophisticated language. (For although even a very young reader may delight in Shakespeare, it takes a grown one and a wise one to understand his full meaning.) And we asked ourselves, " Is it possible, by throwing the stories into plain narrative form, and making the language more ordinary, to represent these vivid pictures so that young readers may be attracted to them — yet reverently, and in the hope that from our pale, if simple, copies they may be led on and attracted to his rich and wonderful work ?"

This, at any rate, was my task : not to extract pleasant and profitable stories, as one might (and as the Lambs did) from the masterpieces of Shakespeare's invention, but to follow him into his dealings with history, where things

iv PREFACE

cannot be forced to happen so neatly as in a made-up tale, and to persuade my young audience that history (in 'spite of their natural distrust) is by no means a dull business when handled by one who marvellously understood the human heart and was able so to put life into the figures of men and women long passed away that they become real to us as we follow their thoughts and motions and watch them making love, making war, plotting, succeeding, or accepting reverses, playing once more the big drama which they played on

earth.

For although "history" means properly "inquiry" or "research," and threatens nowadays to be a pursuit only enjoyable by a few grown-up persons, when taken in hand by such a poet— or " maker "—it becomes again a story in the familiar sense, a moving tale which everyone can under stand and enjoy, children no less than their elders. There had to be this difference, however, between the Lambs' stories and those which I set myself to repeat from Shakes peare — that whereas they had only to rehearse the plot of The Merchant of Venice, for instance, and the result was a pretty and, for their readers, a novel tale, if I contented myself with doing this to the historical plays I should be telling children little more than they already knew from their text-books. It seemed necessary, therefore, to lay more stress on the characters in these plays, and on the many springs of action, often small and subtle ones, by uncovering which Shakespeare made history visible ; to keep to the story indeed, but to make it a story of men's motives and feelings, as well as of the actual events they gave rise to or were derived from.

For the sake of the story in this sense I have often followed Shakespeare where he is inaccurate, though I have sometimes corrected without comment where a slight correction could do no harm. It seemed to me equally uncalled-for on the one hand to talk of Decius Brutus and on the other to omit the tremendous reappearance of Queen

PREFACE v

Margaret in Richard the Third ; equally idle to tie myself to the stage-chronology of King John and to set it elaborately right ; alike unnecessary to repeat Shakespeare's confusion of the two Edmund Mortimers in one play and officious to cut out Mortimer's farewell in another on the ground that it is untrue to fact. The tale's the thing ; else what becomes of Faulconbridge, Falstaff, Fluellen ? In general, therefore, I have made it my rule to follow Shakespeare so long as he tells his story with fairness and justice.

It would be a great pleasure to believe that Shakespeare was always fair and just ; to be convinced (with the illus trious poet who allows me to dedicate my book to him) that Shakespeare had no hand in the slanderous portrait of Joan of Arc sent down to us under his name. But, convinced or not, no writer with a conscience could repeat that portrait for the children in whom are bound up our hopes of a better England than we shall see. Were he to do so, I believe that, thanks to such books as Green's Short History of the English People* and Mr. Andrew Lang's A Monk of Fife, our schoolboys would reject it with scornful disgust. It is enough to say that here they will not be given the chance ; since to-day, if ever, it is necessary to insist that no patriot ism can be true which gives to a boy no knightliness or to a girl no gentleness of heart.

Of true and fervent patriotism these plays are full. Indeed, though they are, in Charles Lamb's words, " strengtheners of virtue " in many ways, that remains their great lesson. It has been said that the real hero of Shake speare's historical plays is England ; and no one can read them and be deaf to the ringing, vibrating note of pride, of almost fierce joy to be an Englishman, to have inherited the liberties of so great a country and be a partaker in her glory. And this love of England is the sincerer for the

* To which, as to a classic, I have gone for what the play denies ; even for some of its language, remembering the effect it had .upon me as a boy.

vi PREFACE

courage with which he owns and grieves that she has been sometimes humiliated, sometimes untrue to herself. But as if this were not enough, he has left us— in Faulconbridge, in King Harry, in the two Talbots— lofty yet diverse ex amples of what patriotism can do ; and again in Coriolanus and Marcus Brutus particular warnings of how even able men who love their country may, by a little unwisdom, injure her and wreck themselves. In short, and with the single exception named, these plays might almost serve as a handbook to patriotism, did that sacred passion need one. For nowhere surely in literature is it so confidently nourished and at the same time so wisely and anxiously directed.

And now, having excused my purpose, let me try to excuse my method also. I started, in my reverence for Charles and Mary Lamb, with some thought of tying myself by their rules of diction, and admitting no word which had not at least a warrant somewhere in Shakespeare. But I soon found (i) that the difference of design baulked my pen, and often in an irritating manner ; and (2) that although I might hope to ape their examples with success enough to deceive many, yet in my heart I was conscious how far short the attempt must fall of that natural easy grace which was theirs alike by genius and by years of loving familiarity with Shakespeare. Every man whose lot it is to write a great deal discovers his own manner, and does his best in that. So I resolved to use my own, and trust to telling the tales as simply and straightforwardly as I could. Now for my purpose it was necessary to be continually breaking up the rhythm of Shakespeare's majestic lines, and reducing them to ordinary prose ; and there remains an apology to make to the critics who, with Shakespeare's lines in their memory, find this hard to tolerate. I ask them to remember that these stories are not intended for grown-up persons who know Shakespeare more or less by heart, but for children to whom their first reading of him is a pleasure to come.

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CORIOLANUS 9

JULIUS CAESAR -' 39

KING JOHN - - 70

KING RICHARD THE SECOND - 92

Q KING HENRY THE FOURTH - 116

KING HENRY THE FIFTH 183

KING HENRY THE SIXTH 214

KING RICHARD THE THIRD 257

APPENDIX - 299

HOTSPUR, GLENDOWER, AND MORTIMER IN COUNCIL. (From a print in the Boydell collection after R. Westall, R.A.)

HISTORICAL TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

. CORIOLANUS

FIVE hundred years before the birth of Christ there lived in Rome a man of noble family named Cams Marcius. One of his ancestors, Ancus Marcius, had been King of Rome, and of the same house were afterwards descended the Marcius who was surnamed Censorinus, from having twice held the censorship, the most venerable office in the commonwealth, and Publius and Quintus Marcius, who together built the great aqueduct which supplied the city with pure water. So that altogether this house of Marcius was a very important one in Rome, and also a very proud one. But of all its members none was ever so proud as this Caius Marcius, whose story we have to tell. His father died when he was quite a child, and thus his training fell into the hands of his widowed mother, the Lady Volumnia. In some respects it could not have fallen into better, for in those days the quality honoured above all others in Rome was man liness, and Volumnia, like a true Roman mother, set herself from the first to encourage her boy in all those manly pur suits to which she saw him inclined by nature. As a child he was taught to handle weapons, to exercise his body, and to endure hard living, so that he became swift in running, dexterous in sword-play, and so strong in wrestling that no man could ever throw him. And when he was but sixteen

10 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

she sent him off to the wars. " For," said she, " had I a dozen sons, and each one as dear to me as my Cams, I had rather have eleven die nobly for their country than one live at home in idle indulgence."

The war to which she sent Caius had been stirred up by Tarquin the Proud, the expelled King of Rome, in the hope of winning back his kingdom. The boy distinguished him self in his first battle, bestriding a Roman soldier who had been beaten to the ground beside him, and slaying the assailant with his own hands. For this feat, when the fight was over and the Roman side victorious, his general caused Caius Marcius to be crowned with a garland of oak-leaves, a coveted honour, and only bestowed on one who saved the life of a fellow-Roman. Deep was Volumnia's joy when he returned to her with his brows thus bound ; while, as for Caius, this first success so spurred his valour, that he soon became known as the bravest fighter in Rome, and though not yet one of her generals — by reason of his youth — yet the first of her warriors, and the swordsman on whom her armies doted and her generals depended.

To this his love and passionate pursuit of honour had led him. But what he and his mother forgot, or perhaps never saw clearly, was this — that the love and pursuit of honour may be so mixed up with pride as to become but a kind of selfishness ; a very sublime kind of selfishness, no doubt, but none the less a disease. Caius Marcius was arrogantly proud, proud of his family, and, as time went on, insuffer ably proud on his own account ; and this self-esteem, while it taught him to scorn all mean actions and petty personal gain, made him churlish and uncivil of speech to all whom he looked upon as his inferiors.

Now the Romans at this time, and for long years after, were divided into two classes, the Patricians and the Ple beians. To the Patricians belonged the old governing families of Rome, descendants of the first founders of the city, a nobility keeping the chief power in their own hands,

CORIOLANUS 11

trained in war and looking upon war as the one occupation which became their dignity. The Plebeians, on the other hand, were an undisciplined and oppressed crowd of traders, handicraftsmen, labourers, and idlers, having this on their side, that they grew in numbers with the growth of the city, until the Patricians, though they still despised, could no longer ignore them.

The chief ground of the Plebeians' complaint, among many, lay in the usury practised upon them by their rich masters. The poor man, unable to pay the heavy interest charged, was not only deprived of his goods but taken and sold into bondage, notwithstanding the wounds and scars he showed which he had received in fighting for Rome ; and this, they urged, was a violation of the pledge given in the late wars, when they had been persuaded to fight, and had, indeed, fought faithfully, under a promise of gentler treat ment. But when the war was done this promise had not been kept. The common people, indeed, were very nearly starving, and the angrier because the city held great stores of corn, which they firmly believed were being kept by the Patricians for their own use.

Their discontent began to break out in tumults and street riots, and word of this soon came to the ears of the neigh bouring states, which were jealous of Rome (with very good reason) and watching for an opportunity to do her a mischief. They believed this opportunity to be come, and prepared to invade her ; and to meet them the Roman Senate made proclamation by sound of trumpet that all men who were of age to carry weapons should come and enter their names on the muster-roll. The Plebeians refused to come ; they had been tricked once with promises (they said), and would not give their masters another chance.

In this fix it began to occur to some of the Senators that they had been too hard upon the poor Plebeians, and many were now for softening the law. But others held out against this, and none so stubbornly as Caius Marcius. In his

12 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

proud opinion these Plebeians were vile dogs and the scum of the earth, and he never scrupled to tell them so to their faces. That he and this dirty, cowardly rabble were men of like flesh and blood was a thing past belief, and since he never opened his mouth to them but to call them curs and worse, it may be fancied how they hated him even while they admired him for a brave soldier.

The Senate consulted for many days, but thanks to Marcius and his party no good came of their discussions. The Plebeians, seeing no redress, took a bold step ; they gathered themselves together and marched out of the city in a body, using no violence, but crying as they went that Rome had no place for them, and that therefore they must go into wide Italy to find free air, water, and earth to bury them ; and so passing out beyond the gates, they encamped on a hill beside the Tiber, called the Sacred Mount.

This stroke fairly disconcerted the Senators, who now sent out some of their number to treat with the malcon tents, and among them one Menenius Agrippa, a friend of Caius Marcius. This Menenius was an old man, not over- wise, and certainly no great friend to the Plebeians ; but having a blunt, hail-fellow way with him which the people liked. He could use his tongue roughly, but for all that he knew how to tackle a crowd in its own humour, and put in just the shrewd hits which folk of that class enjoy in a public speaker. He wasted no fine words on them, but went straight to the point with a homely proverb. " What is this ? You say that while you sweat and starve, your rich masters eat and grow fat ? Did you ever hear tell of the Belly and the Members ? Once upon a time all the mem bers of man's body rebelled against the belly, complaining that it alone remained in the midst of the body, eating all the food and doing nothing, while the rest of them toiled early and late for the body's maintenance— the eye seeing, the ear hearing, the legs walking, and so with the rest. But the belly smiled— by the way, you never heard of such

CORIOLANUS 13

a thing as a belly smiling, did you ? Well, it did, though ; and it answered, " That's true enough that I first receive and (so to speak) cupboard all the meats which nourish man's body ; but afterwards, look you, I send out nourish ment to all the other parts and limbs. And just so, my friends, the Senate of Rome digests and sends out that which benefits you and all members of the state."

Menenius told this old tale so aptly, singling out one who interrupted, and addressing him as the Great Toe, that he very soon had his audience laughing ; and in this good humour they consented with the Senate to come back, on condition that there should be chosen every year five magistrates, called Tribunes, whose special business should be to protect the poor people from violence and oppression.

Caius Marcius was furious when he heard of this conces sion. He had scoffed at the people's stale complaints — that they were hungry, that even dogs must eat, that meat was made for mouths, and the gods did not send corn for rich men only. " The rabble," he declared, " should have pulled the roof off the city before I would have given way and granted them these five fellows to defend their vulgar wisdom."

His rage was diverted for the moment by the news that the Volscians, the chief enemies of Rome, had taken up arms and were in full march upon the city. They had a leader, too, Tullus Aufidius, whom Marcius longed to encounter. The two had met before this, and found each other worthy foes : and between them, apart from their countries' quarrel, there had grown up a fierce but generous rivalry. " He is a lion I am proud to hunt," said Marcius ; and with his own big arrogance. " Were I anything but what I am, I would wish to be Tullus Aufidius." In the campaign for which he was now eager the chief command did not fall to Marcius. By Roman rule this rested with the Consul for the year, Cominius, a gallant commander under whom he was proud to serve as Cominius was glad to have

14 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

his services. But as Marcius, always courteous to his equals, begged Cominius to precede him and lead the way, he could not resist turning for a parting shot at the assembled rabble. "The Volscians have much corn. Shall we take these rats with us to gnaw their granaries ?" But at the mention of fighting the crowd had begun to melt. " Worshipful mutineers, your valour comes forward bravely ! Pray follow !"

So Marcius departed for the wars, followed by the sullen hatred of the poorer citizens and their newly -chosen Tribunes, and by the prayers of his own women-kind, sitting at home at their household work and waiting for news. But no two prayers could well have been more different in spirit than those offered up by Volumnia, his mother, and Virgilia, his gentle-hearted wife. The one rejoiced that her son had gone to win honour and prove his manhood once more, and her pictures of him as the two sat at their sewing terrified the softer Virgilia, who shuddered at the name of bloodshed, and besought Heaven to spare her husband from death. " The gods bless him from that fell Aufidius !" " Aufidius !" cried Volumnia ; " he'll beat Aufidius' head lower than his knee, and then tread on his neck !" But Virgilia could not be quite comforted by this lively picture. She sat and quaked, and would not be tempted out of doors even when her gossiping acquaintances came with news of the campaign, which was now centred upon the Volscian town of Corioli.

Upon this important town the Consul Cominius had directed his march. But hearing that the rest of the Volscians were massing their forces to relieve it, he divided his army into two parts. To the one part, which included Marcius and was commanded by Titus Lartius, one of the bravest of the Roman generals, he entrusted the siege of Corioli ; while with the other he himself marched out into the country to meet and grapple with the relieving forces.

CORIOLANUS 15

The men of Corioli, disdaining the numbers of the division he left behind, were not slow in making a sortie, and at the first onset succeeded in beating back the Romans to their trenches. But Marcius, heaping curses on the runaways and calling on the stoutest fighters to rally and follow him, replied with a superb charge which drove the assailants back to their open gates, through which he hurled himself at their heels — almost alone, for the rain of arrows and javelins from the walls brought his followers to a halt. The Coriolans thereupon slammed-to the city gates, shutting him inside, and Titus Lartius, arriving a little later, was fully persuaded he must have perished. But Marcius meanwhile had laid about him with incredible spirit, and actually hewed his way back to the gates ; so that even while Titus lamented him, these flew open again, and our hero appeared covered with blood, but keeping his pursuers well at bay.

Now was the Romans' chance. They poured in to his rescue, and in a very short time the city was theirs. The baser soldiery then and there fell to sacking and plundering, though across the plain could be distinctly heard the noise of fighting where Cominius and his division had fallen in with the relieving force under Tullus Aufidius, and was being hotly beset. Marcius abhorred this vulgar pillaging, and most of all at such a time when, for aught they knew, their general urgently needed help. The thought of his rival, too, and the chance of encountering him, spurred him to fresh exertions, and he begged Titus Lartius to retain only a force sufficient to hold the city, and dispatch him with the rest to Cominius's relief. To this the old commander readily assented, and Marcius flew on his errand.

His aid was needed. Cominius had been forced to give ground before Tullus Aufidius' attack, and was drawing his men off, albeit in good order, and with none of the violent scolding to which Marcius would have given way in a like reverse. Still the position was grave, and was not made more cheerful by the report of a messenger who had

16 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

seen Titus Lartius and his men driven back on the trenches at the beginning of the fight, and knew nothing of their later success. But the well-known shout of Marcius as he dashed up to the rescue, and his brief tidings that Corioli had fallen, quickly dispelled this gloom and gave the men heart for a second attack. He demanded to be told of the Volscians' order of battle, and on which side they had placed their best fighting men ; and learning that the flower of their warriors, the Antiates, were in the van and led by Aufidius, he besought leave to be set directly against these. This Cominius granted, and as the two armies advanced to their second encounter, Marcius outstripped his company, and so fiercely charged and cut a lane through the Antiates that the press of Romans following into the gap cut the Volscian array in half, and broke it up. Even so he would not desist from fighting, but calling out that it was not for conquerors to faint, pressed forward until the defeat became a rout and the Volscians were chased off the field with great slaughter. In their last rally Marcius for a moment had the joy of finding himself face to face with Aufidius, and the two were exchanging blows when a knot of Volscians came to the succour of their commander and against his will bore him off, to nurse a fiercer longing than ever for revenge. Up to this his hatred of Marcius had been a soldierly one, but now, in the bitterness of defeat, he felt, for the moment at any rate, that he could stick at nothing to be even with the man who had met him already these five times, and always come off with the advantage. " Were he sick, asleep, naked, in sanctuary, nay, my own brother's guest, none of these protections," swore Aufidius, " should hinder me from washing my fierce hand in his heart !"

The next morning the Consul Cominius, having entered Corioli, mounted a chair of state, and in the presence of the whole army gave thanks to the gods for the great victory. Especially he thanked them that Rome had such a soldier as Caius Marcius, and engaged that the citizens at home

CORIOLANUS 17

should echo him. But Marcius would have none of this praise. With a humility which really covered an insane pride — a pride which resented even the suggestion that valour in him could possibly be surprising — he protested that he had done no more than Lartius, for instance, had done : " and that's the best I can." His wounds (he said) smarted to hear themselves thus recognised. When Cominius offered him a tithe of all the horses and treasure captured, he begged to be forgiven for refusing this " bribe to pay his sword," as he put it. To his credit he had an entire contempt for private riches ; but this refusal again smacked at least as much of pride as of disinterestedness. " You are too modest," Cominius insisted ; " and if you will indeed be such an enemy to your own deserts, give us leave to treat you as they treat madmen who seek their own hurt — that is, put you in handcuffs first and then reason with you. Be it known, then," he raised his voice, " that for his valour I present Caius Marcius with the crown of this war, that I beg him to accept my own horse and harness, and in addition proclaim that henceforth, for his deeds before Corioli, he be known to all the world as we here applaud him — CAIUS MARCIUS CORIOLANUS !"

This compliment, paid before the whole army and ac claimed with shouts and the noise of drum and trumpet, our hero could not refuse. " Let me go wash the blood from my face," he answered, " and then you shall perceive whether I blush or no. But, sir, although I have received princely gifts, I have a boon yet to beg." " It is yours before you ask it," said Cominius. " There is among the Volscians an old friend and host of mine, a man who once used me kindly. I saw him taken prisoner yesterday, but I was pursuing Aufidius, and in my heat I neglected him. It would do me great pleasure if I could save him from being sold as a slave." " A noble request and readily granted. What is your friend's name ?" " By Jupiter, I have forgotten " It was his own fine action, not the prisoner, he

2

18 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

was thinking of; and so at the moment when nothing seemed too small for his magnanimous remembrance his selfishness betrayed him.

Caius Marcius — or Coriolanus as we shall henceforth call him — had reached the height of his renown. At home even the discontented Plebeians were awed by the lustre of his exploits, and the path lay open before him to the Consulship, the highest honour Rome could bestow, and beyond that to a great and useful career. Volumnia and Virgilia went forth with the crowd that welcomed him into the city, the one praising the gods for his honourable wounds, the other stopping her tender ears at the mention of them. And such a crowd it was ! Dignified priests jostled with nursemaids and kitchen wenches for a sight of the hero ; fine ladies, regardless of their complexions, having found their stations, sat for hours in the sun's eye to await his coming and throw him their gloves and kerchiefs as he passed. Stalls, windows, parapets, ridge-roofs were thronged. It was faces, faces everywhere ; faces of all complexions, but all agreeing in their earnestness to catch one glimpse of Coriolanus. His worst enemies, the Tribunes, marked all this and agreed among themselves that the great prize of the state, the Consulship— the one gift left for his mother to desire for him — lay within his grasp. And they foresaw well enough that should Coriolanus be Consul their own office might (as they put it) " go to sleep."

But among these Tribunes were two, Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus, astuter than the rest. They watched the exultant entry, and kept their tempers even while Menenius Agrippa (our old friend of the " Belly and the Members " story) jibed at them for envying the Patrician triumph. They bided their time.

For a Roman who sought the Consulship had to observe certain formalities which they foresaw must go sorely against the grain with Coriolanus. In particular, custom required him to appear on the day of canvassing in a humble dress,

CORIOLANUS 19

wearing only a white tunic like any mere workman, without the flowing cloak, or toga, which marked a Roman of birth ; and to solicit each vote as a favour, giving reasons why he thought himself worthy to be Consul, and perhaps even displaying the wounds he had earned in his country's service. For the moment, no doubt, the Plebeians were disposed to forgive Coriolanus' past rancour and to let bygones be by gones. But a very little offensiveness might revive the old dislike and turn the scale against him, and these two clever^ Tribunes believed they might count on his turning restive and showing some of his old arrogance during the canvass.

As it turned out, they were right. At first Coriolanus' candidature went well enough. He had the Senate's sup port, and this his commander Cominius announced before a public assembly in a speech which lauded him to the skies. Coriolanus would not stay to listen to it ; he had already undergone too much of this praise for his taste, and he had not the least desire to hear all his exploits recounted once more, and himself compared as a warrior to a ship in sail and treading men like weeds under its stem. But he returned to hear that the Senate approved his election, and it only remained for him to speak to the people. Upon this (as the Tribunes had expected) he asked leave to be excused the indignity of the canvass, a permission wrhich they were too cunning to grant. Assured now that there were diffi culties ahead, they went off to drill the people, so that the questions put to him, and the manner of putting them, might be providentially irritating to his temper.

The day of canvass arrived, and Coriolanus appeared in the market-place clad in his candidate's tunic, and feeling hot and very much ashamed of himself. The citizens, who had gathered in knots to await his coming, dispersed at once, and, as their cue was, advanced by ones, twos, and threes to put their questions. From the first Coriolanus was not happy in his manner towards them. " What am 1 to say ?" he asked Menenius Agrippa by his side : " surely

20 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

you would not have me ask, ' What, do you want to see my wounds ? Here they are then— I got them in my country's service when some of your brethren roared and ran away from the sound of our own drums.' " " Good heavens !" cried Menenius, "you must not speak of that! Talk to them reasonably, as for their good." "For their good? Shall 1 tell them to go home, then, and wash their faces ?"

The very first knot of citizens began to catechise him in a style not likely to improve his temper. This was a great, day for them, and they felt a high sense of their own im portance. "Tell us, sir, what brings you to stand here?" They insisted upon all the formalities. " My own desert," snapped Coriolanus. " Your own desert ?" " Ay, not my own desire." " How not your own desire ?" " No, sir ; it was never my desire yet to beg of the poor." " You must think, sir," put in one specially offensive catechiser, " that if we give you anything we hope to gain something from you." Coriolanus appeared to be vastly impressed by this, which, to be sure, was a somewhat shopkeeper-like view of .the position. "Ah," he answered, "pray tell me then your price for the Consulship." " The price, sir," interposed another with better sense, " is to ask it kindly." " Kindly?" Coriolanus pitched his voice in a mocking key : " Sir, I pray you let me have it. I have wounds to show, and will show them to you — in private. Your good vote, sir; what say you ? May I count on it ?" " You shall have it, worthy sir," promised a citizen, whose wits happened to be too thick to catch the sarcasm. " That makes two worthy votes begged then. I have your alms. Good-day !" Coriolanus turned on his heel. "There's something odd about this," grumbled the voter who had talked about exchange ; and even the thick-witted one muttered that " if his vote could be given again — but no matter !"

The truth is that even the meanest of us feels a certain importance when he has something to give, and likes to be asked for it politely. Coriolanus was at once too narrowly

CORIOLANUS 21

proud to see what every great leader of men must see, that all men have their feelings and these must not be rough- ridden but understood, and too honestly proud to stoop to devices which other politicians used while despising them. He did, indeed, go through the form of observance, but with an insolent carelessness which made it worse than omission. Nor was his a noble carelessness, as one humble and mistaken observer had termed it. It was not that he did not care, but that in his heart he hated these Plebeians. He felt all the while how false his position was, and by and by, as this feeling became intolerable, he broke out bitterly, " Here come more votes ! Your votes, pray ! For your votes I have fought and kept watch ; for your votes I carry two dozen odd wounds, and have seen thrice six battles — or heard of them. Pray, pray, give me your votes then, for indeed I want to be Consul !"

Puzzled and angered, yet remembering his past services, they gave him their votes. To this — as their Tribunes presently discovered with some dismay — they stood com mitted. Coriolanus had gone off to change his detestable garments, and, as he put it, " know himself again." Nothing remained but to confirm the election. Yet the temper of the people was sulky, and Brutus and Sicinius quickly perceived that all was not lost. " What ? Could you not see he was mocking you ? Could you not have insisted that as Consul he would be the state's servant, and have pressed your claims and tied him by a promise to serve you instead of speaking, as he always has spoken, against your liberties and charters ? Had you not a man's heart amongst you, that you suffered all his contempt and gave him just what he asked ?" " It is not too late yet," cried the citizen who had talked about exchange ; " the election is not yet confirmed !" " Be quick then, and re voke this ignorant choice of yours ! Stay — put the fault on us. Say that we, your Tribunes, over-persuaded you by laying stress on his great deeds and his ancestry, but that

22 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

on second thoughts you find him your fixed enemy and regret our advice — our advice, mind ! Harp on that." " We will !" shouted the crowd, who by this time repented the election almost to a man. They rushed off to the Capitol, and Brutus and Sicinius followed to watch this pretty storm of their raising.

Coriolanus, who fully deemed himself Consul elect, and was so deemed by the Senators, was talking among them with Titus Lartius, newly returned from Corioli. Tullus Aufidius, so Titus reported, had raised new troops, and in the face of them the Romans had been the quicker in offering terms of peace and coming away. In short, the Volscians, though checked for a while, were still dangerous. Their general, Aufidius, in wrath at their yielding Corioli so cheaply, had retired to his own house in the neighbour ing town of Antium. " I wish I had cause to seek him there," muttered Coriolanus, little thinking that he would indeed be seeking Aufidius very soon, but not as Consul of Rome.

For while he came along the street discussing this news, he found his way unexpectedly barred by the Tribunes Brutus and Sicinius. " Pass no further," they commanded ; " there will be mischief if this man goes to the market place." "Why," cried the Senators, "is not Coriolanus elected by nobles and commons both?" "No; for the people are incensed against him. They cry out that they have been mocked, and call to mind his late opposition when corn was distributed to them free." " And so," Coriolanus broke out, " on that account they take back their votes, and I am not to be Consul ! I'd better deserve the worst of them, then, and be made a vulgar Tribune like yourself!" " Let me tell you," answered Sicinius, " that if you wish to attain whither you're bound, you had better inquire your way, which you're out of, more gently, or you'll never be either Consul or Tribune." Menenius and Cominius here interposed, imploring calm ; but Coriolanus broke out,

CORIOLANUS 28

" Talk to me of corn ! What I said then I'll repeat." It was in vain that the Senators tried to check him. " No ; I will say it. This shifty, foul-smelling rabble shall learn that I do not flatter. I say again that in truckling to them we are feeding a harvest of tares, of insolence, and sedition, which we ourselves have ploughed for and sown in our folly !" " No more, we beseech you !" his friends entreated. But Coriolanus' anger had passed completely out of control. He rated the Senators for their past lenity. " The rabble had well deserved corn ! How ? By shirking to fight for their country ? By mutinies and revolts during the cam paign ? No ! they demanded it, and the Senate, terrorised by their voting strength, gave way. ' Enough !' you say ? Nay, take more — hear it all. When gentry, title, wisdom cannot conclude without the ' yes ' or ' no ' of general ignorance, then I say you must neglect the true necessity of the state for unstable vanity. I bid you — those of you who prefer a noble life to a long one — pluck out this multi tude's tongue ! Cease to let it lick poison because it finds poison sweet ! Put an end to this dishonour which takes from your state the power to do good by submitting it to the control of that which only knows, or can do, evil !"

"Enough !" cried the Tribunes. " He has spoken like a traitor, and shall answer as a traitor ! This man a Consul ? Never !" They shouted for their officers, the aediles, to summon the people. Sicinius laid hands on Coriolanus to arrest him. The Senators offered to be surety, but Coriolanus flung him off. " Hence, old goat ! Hence, rotten thing ! or I will shake your bones out of your garments." " Help ! help !" shouted Sicinius, and the sediles and rabble came running together to his rescue. For a while, as they hustled about Coriolanus and tried to lay hands on him, their cries and the counter-cries of the Patricians deafened the air. At length Menenius appealed to the Tribunes to speak to the people, and between them they managed to get a hearing. But when they spoke it

24 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

was not to soothe the feeling against Coriolanus. "The city of Rome is the people, and we are the people's magistrates. We must stand to that authority or lose it, and in the name of the people we pronounce Marcius worthy of death, and command that he be carried hence and hurled from the Tarpeian rock," — for this was the form of death set apart for traitors by Roman custom. " ^Ediles, seize him !" Coriolanus drew his sword. " No, no " — Menenius would have prevented him, calling on the Tribunes, to withdraw for a while. But it was too late, and a moment after he was shouting to his fellow-nobles to help Coriolanus, as the rabble made a rush crying, " Down with him ! down with him !"

In the skirmish which followed the men of birth had the upper hand, and beat Tribunes, aediles, and mob together out of the street. " On fair ground I could whip forty such curs," panted Coriolanus; but Cominius knew that their advantage was a short one, and he and Menenius persuaded Coriolanus to escape to his house before the crowd came pouring back — as it presently did, demanding his instant death without trial for resisting the law. It taxed all Menenius' powers of persuasion to patch up a truce for the moment, engaging that if the Tribunes would promise a regular form of trial he would produce Coriolanus to submit to it. To this the Tribunes, after some dispute, declared themselves ready ; and dispersed their followers, command ing them, however, to reassemble in the market-place where the trial should be held.

It was no easy matter to persuade Coriolanus to attend. At home he raged up and down, swearing the rabble should pull his house about his ears and pile ten Tarpeian rocks one on another, or tear him in pieces by wild horses before he would submit. His friends could do nothing with him, and it was Volumnia who at length persuaded him to go. Coriolanus had always the deepest respect, as well as love, for his mother. From her he had learnt that passion for

CORIOLANUS 25

honour which he followed with so headstrong a will, and when she besought him to go and use fair speech, insisting that this could not disgrace him, he sullenly consented. ''We'll prompt you," promised Cominius ; "remember 'mildly' is the word." And "mildly" echoed Menenius. " Mildly be it then," grumbled Coriolanus, " mildly !"

In the market-place the people were awaiting him, well drilled by Brutus and Sicinius to echo whatever cry the Tribunes should raise. These two felt confident that they had only to put Coriolanus in a passion and he would be in their power. Coriolanus entered, his friends following close and standing about him to hold him in check, and Sicinius began to question him. "Do you submit to the people's voice and acknowledge their officers ? and are content to suffer such legal censure as may be pronounced on you?" " I am content," was the answer. " There ! you see he is content," put in the delighted Menenius : " he is a soldier, remember ; you must not expect a soldier to be over-gentle in his language." " Well, well, no more of that," commented Cominius, who did not feel easy just yet. And in his very next words Coriolanus began to take the offensive, demand ing why, after being elected Consul, he was dishonoured by having his election annulled. " It is your business here to answer, not to ask questions," said Sicinius. Still Corio lanus kept down his temper. " True, so it is." " We charge you that you have deprived Rome of her con stitutional government and taken to yourself tyrannical power, for which you are a traitor to the people of Rome." This was too much. The charge, a new and unexpected one, had no justification. But it was the word "traitor" which stuck in Coriolanus' throat. "'Traitor!'" — in a moment he was past holding. " May the fires of lowest hell wrap this people ! Call me their traitor ! If this lying Tribune had twenty thousand deaths for me, I would call him the liar that he is!" "To the rock! To the rock!" bawled the multitude. Still his friends implored, but Corio-

26 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

lanus was now utterly deaf. " Be it the rock, or be it exile, flaying, starvation, I would not buy their mercy with a single word."

Exile was the sentence the Tribunes had determined on, and in the name of the people Sicinius now pronounced it. Perhaps they hardly dared to exact the last penalty of the Tarpeian rock, but this they promised awaited Coriolanus if he ever again set foot within the gates of Rome.

" Curs !" answered Coriolanus, " it is I who banish you ! Remain, and tremble at every rumour of war, shake when ever you see the plumes of your invaders nodding. Banish your defenders one by one, until your ignorance delivers you captive without a blow. For your sakes I despise Rome, and thus turn my back on her. There is a world elsewhere." And so he turned and departed, while they flung up their caps and shouted, " The people's enemy is gone !"

His wife, his mother, and a few friends escorted him to the gate. " Do not weep ; a brief farewell is the best. Nay, mother, remember your ancient courage." Volumnia called curses upon the " many-headed beast " that treated her son so ungratefully. Virgilia could only weep. Old Cominius, that true friend, would have gone with him for a while, but Coriolanus forbade it and went his way alone.

\Yhither was Coriolanus bound ? He was, as we have seen, a man with many great elements ; and yet not an entirely great man, for selfishness infected them all. Even his high worship of honour had its roots in selfishness. He could say, and he believed, that he had fought and bled for his country, but at heart he thought first of self. He, the brave and noble Coriolanus, had been insulted, abused, treated with shameful ingratitude. The wound to his self- love poisoned all his thoughts. He forgot his boasted affection for his country, forgot everything but his one desire — to be revenged.

It was twilight in the Volscian town of Antium when a

CORIOLANUS 27

stranger, dressed in mean apparel and wearing a muffler about his face, entered the gate and wandered along the streets like a man uncertain of his way. Many people passed, but no man knew him. Of one of these he asked to be directed to the house of Tullus Aufidius.

Tullus Aufidius was dining and (as it chanced) entertain ing the Senators of Antium, for the Volscians were even now on the eve of launching a fresh invasion into Roman territory under his guidance. The troops were mustered, Aufidius had made his preparations, and the Senators had gathered to-night to wish him good speed. From the banqueting-room where they feasted the sound of music poured through the doors into the outer hall, where the serving-men ran to and fro with dishes or shouted for more wine. Such was the scene upon which Coriolanus entered, still in his disguise, and stood for a moment looking about him. " A goodly house ! And the feast smells well ; but I have scarcely the look of a guest." " Hullo, friend !" called out one of the slaves, " what's your business, and where do you come from ? Here's no place for you ; go to the door, pray." "And whence are you, sir?" demanded another: " has the porter no eyes, that he admits such fellows ? Pray, get you out." " Away !" Coriolanus thrust him aside. " Away ? It's for you to go away. I'll have you talked with in a moment." " What fellow's this ?" inquired a third. " A strange one as ever I saw. I cannot get him out of the house. Prithee, call my master to him." " Let me but stand here," said Coriolanus ; " I will not hurt your hearth." But the fellow insisted that he must begone, and so insolently that Coriolanus lost his temper and caught him a sound buffet. In the midst of this hubbub Aufidius him self entered, having been summoned to deal with the intruder. "Where is this fellow?" he asked; and per ceiving Coriolanus, " Your business, pray ? and your name ? Be quick, if you please— your name, sir ?"

Coriolanus unwound the muffler from his face. "A name,

28 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

Tullus, not musical in the Volscians' ears, and I believe harsh to thine."

Still Aufidius did not recognise him, being unprepared for this visitor, of all men. " Thou hast a face of com mand, and seemest a noble ship, though thy tackle is torn. But I know thee not."

"I am Caius Marcius, once thy foe in particular, and foe of all the Volscians, as my surname Coriolanus may wit ness. That name is all my thankless country requites me with. The cruelty and envy of the rabble, by leave of the dastard nobles who forsook me, have swallowed all the rest and hounded me out of Rome. Therefore I am come to your hearth — not in hope to save my life — but in spite, to be revenged on my banishers. If thou, too, desirest revenge on Rome, make my misery serve thy turn ; use me, and I will fight against my country with the spleen of all the devils below. If thou dare not, if it weary thee to try thy fortune afresh, then I am weary, weary to live, and offer my life here to thee and our old grudge."

While he spoke Aufidius had drawn back in amazement. But he was a man of generous impulse, and in a moment he fought down his present incredulity and his old malice together :

" O Marcius, Marcius ! Each word of thine plucks up a root of our ancient envy !" He embraced the foe whose body he had so often and vainly assailed with sword and lance. " Not when my wedded wife first crossed my thres hold did my heart dance as it dances now to see thee here, thou noble thing ! Why, thou Mars ! I tell thee we have a power on foot now, at this moment ; and once more I was purposing to hew thy shield from thine arm or lose my own arm in the endeavour. Time upon time thou hast beaten me, and night after night I have dreamed of new encoun ters — in my sleep we have been down together, tearing loose our helms, fisting each other's throat— and so waked half-dead with nothing. Worthy Marcius! Had we no

CORIOLANUS 29

other quarrel with Rome than her banishing thee, we would muster all from youngest to oldest to avenge thee. Come, come in ; take our friendly Senators by the hand — they are here to wish me good speed. Take the half of my com mand, and direct thine own revenge. Thou shouldst know best when and how to strike Rome. Come in, I say. They shall say yes to all thy desires. Welcome a thousand times ! more a friend than ever an enemy — and yet that was much, Marcius ! Your hand, come !"

They passed together into the banqueting-room, and soon the disconcerted slaves had plenty to gossip about as they saw the strange visitor seated at the upper table and feasted, questioned, and consulted amid the deferential awe of the Senators. Aufidius was as good as his word, and readily gave up to Coriolanus the half of his com mission. With his undreamt-of ally there was no division and no hesitation in the counsels of Antium. It was war now, and war without delay.

In Rome the Tribunes were* congratulating themselves. Their enemy was gone, and they had heard no more of him. It was pleasant to see the tradesmen singing in their shops, or going amicably about their business instead of running about the streets in tumult as in the days when they had Caius Marcius to provoke them. The Tribunes took great credit for this and for having rid Rome of one who aimed at kingship. They could repeat this false accusation safely ; and Menenius and his fellow Senators, while they shook their heads, took care to treat the Tribunes with considera tion. As for Coriolanus, even his mother and wife heard nothing from him.

The first warning of something amiss came from a slave, who reported that the Volscians were astir again and had crossed the Roman frontiers with two separate armies. He carried this news to the aediles, and was by those wise acres promptly clapped into prison for a liar. " Have him

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whipped," commanded Brutus. Menenius suggested that it might be as well to make a few inquiries before whipping him.

And while Brutus and Sicinius protested that the tale could not be true — it was not possible — there arrived a messenger with word that the nobles had received news, and were crowding to the Senate House. The slave's report had been confirmed by a second. Marcius had joined with Aufidius, and was marching on Rome to revenge himself.

" A likely story !" sneered Sicinius. " Ay," added Brutus, " and raised no doubt to make the weaker spirits wish him home again." But this messenger was followed by another, and he again by Cominius in a towering rage. " You've made good work !" he broke out, addressing the Tribunes. " What news ? What news ?" asked Menenius eagerly ; and being told it, he, too, rounded on the Tribunes. " You've made good work, you and your apron-men ! Oh, you've made fine work !" " But is this true, sir ?" Brutus stam mered. " True ? You'll look pale enough before you find it anything else. He will shake Rome about your ears ? Who can blame him ? And who can beg his mercy ? Not you Tribunes — you who deserve such pity as a wolf deserves of the shepherd. Yes, indeed, you've made good work of it ! You've brought Rome to a pretty pass !" " Say not we brought it." "Who, then?" snapped Menenius: "was it we? We loved him ; but, cowards that we were, we gave way and allowed your crew of danglers to hoot him out of the city. Here they come, your danglers !" as the crowd poured around them discussing the news. " Well, sirs, how do you like your handiwork ?" The crowd was scared, but clamorous after its wont, each man noisily anxious to shift the blame off his own shoulders. " For my part, when I voted to banish him I said 'twas a pity." " I always said we were in the wrong." " So did we all." " You are goodly things, you voters," said Cominius, with bitter contempt.

CORIOLANUS 31

The peril was urgent. Town after town yielded before Coriolanus without a blow, and Rome, divided within her gates, lay apparently at his mercy. In name he shared the command with Aundius, but in fact Coriolanus was the sole hero of the campaign. The Volscian soldiery swore by their new leader, and his popularity began to teach Aundius that the roots of ancient envy are not so easily plucked up after all. Aundius was a generous man, up to a point ; he had proved it by a highly generous action. But to obey a generous impulse is easier than to keep a magnanimous temper constant in face of a rival's success. Something of the old jealousy awoke in the Volscian leader ; he saw, or thought he saw, that Coriolanus behaved more haughtily towards him than at first ; his near friends and lieutenants encouraged the suspicion ; he began to repent that he had given up half his command. Too big a man to deny his rival's merit, he was little enough to be galled by it, and to spy out faults which might some day serve for an accusation. " Coriolanus has merit ; yet something brought him to grief once in spite of it. He has merit enough to silence criticism ; yet he fell. Our virtues are as men choose to interpret them ; a man may have power and be conscious of his own deserts, yet he will not find in an epitaph what he lacked in the praise of the living. Fire drives out fire, one nail another, and one man's reputation another's. When Rome has fallen, and Caius Marcius thinks himself strongest, my time shall come."

In Rome there was absolute dismay, and no attempt even to disguise it. Panic-stricken women ran wailing about the streets ; the temples were filled with old folks weeping bitterly and entreating the gods ; nor could a man be found wise or strong enough to provide for the city's defence. At the suit of the Tribunes (humble enough by this time) Cominius had been persuaded to visit the Volscian camp and supplicate Coriolanus in person. Coriolanus would not listen to his old commander; but as he knelt and pleaded

32 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

their old acquaintance and blood shed together for Rome's sake, bade him rise, and with no more words, but a wave of the hand only, dismissed him back to the city. Where Cominius had failed would Menenius succeed ? It was not likely ; yet Menenius had strong claims on Coriolanus' love, and at length suffered himself to be persuaded. Cominius has perhaps chosen an unhappy moment. Menenius, a firm believer in the influence of the stomach over men's actions, would choose a propitious one, after dinner. The mission flattered his sense of importance ; he might be able to show these huckstering Tribunes something, these fellows who were likely to cheapen coals by getting Rome burnt to the ground. After all he did not despair.

So he, too, set out for the Volscian camp. But his reception there was scarcely encouraging. The sentries at first would not let him pass, and seemed as little im pressed by his name as by his recital of friendly services done for Coriolanus in the past. "You are mistaken," they assured him, " if you think to blow out the fire preparing for Rome with such weak breath as this." While they wrangled, Coriolanus himself came by in talk with Aufidius. " Now, you fellow," Menenius promised, " you shall see in what estimation I am held, and if a Jack-in-office can keep me from my son Coriolanus without hanging for it or worse"; and approaching Coriolanus, "The glorious gods sit in hourly synod about thy particular prosperity, and love thee no worse than thy old father Menenius does ! O my son, my son ! I was hardly moved to come to thee ; but being assured that none but myself could move thee, I have been blown out of our gates with sighs, and conjure thee to pardon Rome and thy petitioning countrymen. The good gods assuage thy wrath, and turn the dregs of it upon this varlet here — this blockhead, who hath denied my access to thee !" " Away !" answered Coriolanus. " Eh ? How ? Away ?" stammered Menenius. " Away ! I know not wife, mother, or child ; I am servant to the Volscians now.

CORIOLANUS 38

My ears are closed against your petitions more firmly than your gates against me. Not another word !" He turned to Aufidius. " This man was my dear friend in Rome, yet thou see'st." " You keep a constant temper," said Aufidius. The two generals turned away and left Menenius standing red and discomfited before the jeers of the sentinels. "As for you, I take no account of such fellows. I say to you as I was said to, Away !" and away he stalked, followed by their laughter.

There was yet one plea left for Rome. While Coriolanus sat within his tent, grieved to have sent this old friend home (as he said) with a cracked heart, and resolute to listen to no more embassies, a stir arose without in the camp. No man had the cruelty to disturb or forbid this new proces sion. At the head of it in deepest mourning walked Virgilia, and behind her Volumnia leading Coriolanus' little son Marcius by the hand, and behind them again a train of Roman ladies, all in sorrowful black. They entered the tent and knelt before him, while Coriolanus rose, divided between his heart's instinct and his resolution to deny it.

" My lord and husband !" murmured Virgilia, and ceased.

" These eyes " — Coriolanus tried to recover his firmness — "are not the same I wore in Rome."

" Sorrow — the sorrow that has changed us — makes you think so."

He could hold back his love no longer. " Best of my flesh, forgive me; but do not say, 'Forgive our Romans.' One kiss — a kiss *as long as my exile, as sweet as my revenge!" He turned to his mother and knelt to salute her.

But Volumnia bade him rise, and, in spite of his protesta tion, sank herself upon her knees, and the child Marcius beside her. "Thou art my warrior; I helped to frame thee; this is thy son, and thyself in little." "The God of soldiers," said Coriolanus, " make him a noble soldier, proof against shame, and give him to stand in war like a great sea-mark,

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steadfast, the salvation of men who look upon him!" "And it is we who plead with you," said Volumnia.

" Nay, I beseech. Or, if you will plead, bid me not dismiss my soldiers or capitulate a second time with Rome's mechanics ; plead not against ^my revenge, for to that I have sworn."

" You deny beforehand all we ask, yet we will and must ask." "Then all the Volscians shall hear it," said Corio- lanus, and he called them to stand around.

"My son," said Volumnia, "should we hold our peace, yet the sight of us and our raiment would bewray what manner of life we have led since thy exile. Think how far more unfortunate than all living women are we, since the sight of thee, which should make our eyes flow with joy, our hearts dance with comfort, constrains them to weep and shake with sorrow and terror, making us, thy wife, thy mother, thy child, to see thee besieging the walls of his native country. Ah, it is worst for us ; for others may pray to the gods, but we cannot. How can we pray for our country and for thy victory — both so dear to us — when one must destroy the other ? when, whichever wins, a curse is bound up in the prayer ? Either my son must be led, a foreign recreant, in manacles through our streets, or march in triumph through them, trampling on his country's ruin. But, for me, I will not see that day. If I cannot persuade thee, thou shalt march to assault thy country over thy mother's body that brought thee into the world."

" Ay," echoed Virgilia, " and over mine that brought thy son into the world to keep thy name alive."

Coriolanus groaned. " I do wrong to look on women's faces; they turn a man to womanish tenderness." He turned to leave them.

" Nay," commanded Volumnia, " go not thus from us. Did we implore thee to save the Romans by destroying the Volscians, thou mightst condemn us as aiming against thine honour. But we plead only to reconcile them, so that

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the Volscians may say, ' This mercy we have shown ' ; and the Romans, ' This mercy we have received,' and both unite in blessing thee as the maker of this peace. Son, the end of war is uncertain ; but this is certain, that if thou conquer Rome it will be to reap a name which shall be dogged with curses, and its chronicle thus written, ' The man was noble, but with his last attempt he wiped out the remembrance of it and destroyed his country, and his name remains abhorred.' "

Yet Coriolanus sat silent. He could not trust himself to speak.

" Answer me, my son. Dost thou think it honourable for a noble man to remember the wrongs and injuries done him. Daughter, speak to him. He cares not for your weeping. Speak to him, boy ; thy childishness may move him more than our reasoning. Son, no son in the world owes his mother more than thou owest ; never in thy life hast thou shown thy mother any courtesy ; not when she, poor soul, fond of no other child, doted on thee going to the wars, doted on thee returning laden with honour. Is my plea unjust? Spurn it, then. But if it be just, as thou fearest heaven, deny not thy mother her due."

A last time he would have turned away, but she and Virgilia and the child flung themselves on their knees together, uplifting their hands.

And seeing this, Coriolanus was mastered. He stepped to his mother, and lifting her, held her by the hand for a

moment, silent. Then with a cry speech broke from him

" O mother, mother, what have you done to me !" Still he held her hand, fighting for words. " O mother, you have won a happy victory for your country, but— though you know it not— mortal and unhappy for your son !" He turned to Aufidius. " Sir, though I cannot make this war as I promised, I can and will make a peace to suit you. Say," he added, almost wistfully, since he had come to trust Aufidius, " could you in my place have listened to a mother

CORIOLANUS 37

less? or have granted less?" "I was moved myself," owned Aufidius, but this was all he would say. " I dare be sworn you were. But advise me, my friend, touching what peace you will make. I remain here, and I pray you stand by me in this matter." He would fain have gone to Rome with them whose dearness to him he had just so dearly proved ; but his honour held him among the Volscians. " By and by," he promised ; and dismissed them back on their happy errand. " You deserve to have a temple built to you ; all the swords in Italy could not have made this peace."

Meanwhile in Rome the citizens swayed between hope and despair. Watchers lined the walls, their eyes bent on the Volscian camp. Within the city the mob had seized upon Brutus, and haled him up and down, promising him a lingering death if the petitioners brought back no comfort.

At length a cry went up from the walls, a shout The Volscian camp was moving, retiring. Messengers came running, one after another, with the tidings ; and soon, like the blown tide through an archway, the glad throng poured in through the gates. Trumpets sounded, drums, all instru ments of music half-drowned in a tumult of cheering. And when at length Volumnia and her ladies appeared, escorted by the Senators, the crowd pressed about them rapturously, strewing flowers and shouting, " Welcome ! welcome !" Some lit triumphal fires ; others ran and flung open the gates of all the temples, which soon were filled with men crowned with garlands and doing sacrifice as though news had come of a great victory.

Coriolanus was not to share this joy. He had spoken truth when he told his mother that she had won a victory most mortal for him. He turned his back upon the rejoicing city, and went, as his honour summoned him, friendless back to his fate. For as he led the Volscian troops homeward, Aufidius hurried before him, and before he reached Antium with drum and colours, Aufidius had made ready to receive

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him. " He has betrayed us. For a few women's tears he has bartered all the blood and labour of our great actions " ; such was the charge forwarded by Aufidius in letters to the Senators. So when Coriolanus halted in the market-place, and delivered up the terms of peace, Aufidius stepped for ward. " Read it not, noble lords ! But tell this man he is a traitor !"

" Traitor !" Coriolanus turned on him fierce and amazed. " Ay, traitor," Aufidius repeated doggedly, " traitor and coward." " My lords," Coriolanus faced the Senators, " you shall judge me, and your judgment shall give this cur the lie, as he — he who shall carry the marks of my past whippings to his grave — already knows himself to be a liar." The Senators would have interposed, but the crowd had been instructed beforehand. Many had cause to hate Coriolanus for sons, fathers, kinsmen lost to them in fight ing Rome. They pressed about him, crying, "Kill! kill!" — and pierced with stroke upon stroke of their daggers, Coriolanus fell.

They had killed him believing him their enemy; but, their rage spent, they knew that they had slain a great man. Lifting the body, they bore it with military honours through the streets of Antium, and buried it as became its rank and its great deeds.

JULIUS C.&SAR

FOUR hundred and fifty years had passed and the Rome of Coriolanus had become the mistress of the world. But all these years had not healed the quarrel between the patricians and plebeians ; for as the city increased in size and dignity and empire, so her citizens increased in numbers and grew less and less inclined to submit to the rule of a few noble and privileged families. And these civil quarrels became more bloody and dangerous as Rome lost that fear of the foreigner which had once bound her citizens together in self-defence.

To hold and garrison her vast possessions, too, she needed soldiers, and drew them from far and wide to fight under her eagles. And in times of peace these soldiers, being out of employment, were only too apt to meddle with civil affairs ; until at length it became clear that whoever wanted the upper hand must get the support of the army. The man who perceived this most clearly was himself a soldier and one of the greatest generals the world has ever known —Julius Caesar ; and his hope was, by making himself master of the army, to rule alone and supreme and by strong and steady government to put an end to the miser able dissensions from which the state suffered.

To this he attained after a long struggle with his great rival Pompey. When it was over and the sons of Pompey, after their father's death, had been crushed in the battle of Munda, Caesar treated the vanquished party with great leniency, no doubt because he wanted as few enemies as possible in the work of steady government to which, as

39

40 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

master of the whole Roman world, he was now to turn his mind.

But he had made more enemies than he bargained for, and some quite unsuspected ones. To begin with, the beaten Pompeians were not men of the sort to understand his generosity or to be grateful for it. Then some of his own followers were angry because their rewards had fallen short of what they believed themselves entitled to ; and also because Caesar, though he had given them high appoint ments, went his own way, as strong men will, without con sulting them. There were others again— noble spirits — who loved him and yet believed that so much power in the hands of one man was a danger to that Liberty on which the Romans had always prided themselves. As for the mob, they cheered for the man who was up, after the manner of mobs. A few months ago they had climbed the walls and house-tops and shouted themselves hoarse for Pompey. Now that Pompey was dead, and Caesar returned in triumph from his victory over Pompey's sons, they shouted with equal enthusiasm for Caesar.

And Ciusar, in the glow of his triumph, had parted with some of his old wisdom. Men of his great achievements become what we call " men of destiny " ; and just as their enemies fail to see that success so mighty must contain something fatal, and cannot wholly depend on one man's cleverness or good luck, so they themselves are apt to forget that they are but the instruments of Heaven, and to take all the credit and become vain and puffed up. Thus the moment of Caesar's triumph was the moment of his most dangerous weakness : for fancying himself almost a god, he began to talk and act in a way which persuaded his enemies that he was no more than a man with an ordinary man's frailties. Both were mistaken, and Destiny as usual turned the mistakes of both to her own sure purposes.

As usual, too, she gave warning ; and at first in that small and seemingly casual voice which men disregard at

JULIUS C/ESAR 41

the time and remember afterwards. There was an annual festival at Rome called the Lupercalia, held on the i5th of February, at the foot of the Aventine Hill, where Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city, had been discovered as infants with a she-wolf for their nurse. No doubt in the beginning it had been a rude shepherd's festival ; but the Romans, proud to be reminded of their city's small beginnings, had appointed a company of priests who yearly on this date made a sacrifice of goats in honour of the old mother-wolf, and afterwards cut their skins into thongs. And the custom was for many noble youths to strip naked and run with these thongs, with which they playfully struck the bystanders. One of the runners this year was Mark Antony, a young man of pleasure, but of ambition too and excellent parts, when his love of pleasure allowed him to use them, and an especial friend of Caesar's. Caesar himself attended in state with his train of followers and flatterers, among whom one Casca was foremost calling " Silence !" to the crowd whenever the great man so much as opened his mouth.

The great man just now was talking familiarly with Antony, who stood ready stripped for the course, when a shrill voice from the throng cried " Caesar !" " Ha ! who calls ?" asked Caesar, turning about, and the officious Casca ordered silence again. " Beware the ides of March !"* — It was a soothsayer who gave this warning, and repeated it when Casca called him forward ; but Caesar lightly dismissed him as a " dreamer," and passed on to see the show.

The crowd followed at his heels, and left two men stand ing — noble Romans both of them. Their names were

* The Romans marked off their months by three points : the Kalends or ist day, and the Nones and Ides, which were the 7th and i5th of March, May, July, October, and the 5th and i3th of other months. They began by reckoning the number of days before the Nones, then the Ides, then the Kalends of next month. The Ides of March were he i 3th.

H i FROM SHAKESPEARE

Marcus Brutus and Caius Cassius, and a close friendship, united them in spite of their very different natures. No citi/en of Rome was more upright than Brutus, more single- minded, more unselfishly patriotic. A philosopher and a man of books rather than of action, he was in some ways as . imp),. as H . lnl.1 ; and U-in;; pc.rl'f,' ily hour:- t liini'.'-lf, doubted not that every one else must be honest. Privately he liked Caesar and was respected by Caesar ; but he believed from the bottom of his heart that all this power in the hands of one man was a monstrous treason to the old Roman idea of liberty, and a danger to the commonwealth, and he watched it with a growing sadness and indignation.

Cassius, too, was indignant ; but for reasons less lofty than those which moved Brutus. He felt the wrong done to the state ; but being of a splenetic and angry temper, he disliked and was jealous of Cajsar. And Caesar paid back this feeling with suspicion. " That Cassius," he said once to Antony, " has a lean and hungry look. lie thinks too much, and such men are dangerous." " Fear him not, Caesar," replied Antony, " he is a noble Roman and well disposed." " I would he were fatter," Causar. persisted, 'who liked to have sleek and contented men about him : "If I, Causar, were liable to fear, I do not know whom I should avoid so soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much, is a great observer ; he loves no plays as thou dost, Antony ; hears no music ; smiles seldom ; and then as if he scorned himself for smiling. Men such as he are never easy of heart while they behold a greater than themselves; and therefore they are very dangerous." And Ca.-sar was right, though he fancied himself too great to fear tbit danger which he pointed out.

" Will you go see the runners ?" asked Cassius, as he and Brutus were left alone.

" Not I," said Brutus, " I am not inclined for sport, and lack Antony's lively spirits. But do not let me hinder you, Cassius."

JULIUS C/ESAR 43

" Brutus, how comes it that your manner to me has changed of late ? I miss the old gentleness and show of love, and observe that you bear yourself stiffly towards the friend who loves you."

" Pardon me, Cassius. I am troubled in mind, at war with myself ; and it is this which makes me seem negligent in my behaviour to my good friends."

" Then," said Cassius, " I have mistaken you, and my mistake has made me keep buried in my breast some thoughts of mine well worth imparting. Tell me, Brutus," he asked abruptly, " can you see your face ? . . . I wish you could ; and I have heard of men of the best respect in Rome — except immortal Caesar," he put in with a sneer ; " men groaning under this present yoke — declare how they wished Brutus would but use his eyes."

" Cassius, into what dangers would you lead me ?"

" Well, my friend, let me be your glass ; and look on me that you may discover more of yourself than you yet know." And he was beginning to protest what Brutus well knew, that he was no common flatterer or loose talker in company, when the noise of distant shouting interrupted him.

" What means this shouting ?" said Brutus ; " I fear the people are acclaiming Caesar for their king."

" Ay, do you fear that ? Then I must think you would not have it so."

" No, Cassius, though I love him well. But what is it you would impart to me ? If it be aught toward the public good, you know that I prize what is honourable more than I fear death."

Thus encouraged, Cassius unfolded his tale of grievance. " Is it honour that we should all stand in awe of this one Caesar, a man like ourselves ? You and I wrere born free as Caesar. Is he in any way more of a man ? He is a great swimmer ; yet I have swum the roaring Tiber with him, and he has called to me to save him from drowning. I have seen him in Spain, sick of a fever — this god of

44 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

ours— shaking and pallid, and calling for drink like a sick

girl."

" Hark !" said Brutus, " they are shouting again, believe this applause must be for some new honours heaped on him."

" Why, man, he bestrides this narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. Men at one time or another are masters of their own fate, and if we are underlings, we, and not our stars, not our destinies, are to blame. Brutus and Caesar! Why Caesar more than Brutus ? Is Rome so degenerate that in this last age it holds but one man, and makes him king ? There was a Brutus once who would have brooked the devil himself in Rome as easily as a king." He spoke of that Lucius Junius Brutus, his friend's ancestor, who had in old times expelled the Tarquins. Cassius was indeed no common flatterer, but knew exactly how to touch his friend's pride. Brutus was moved. He confessed that he guessed Cassius' mean ing ; he would think of what had been said ; would talk of it further at some other time. Meanwhile let Cassius sustain himself with this — " Brutus had rather be a villager than repute himself a son of Rome under such conditions as he foresees will be laid upon Romans."

The re-entry of Caesar and his train broke off their talk. Something had clearly happened at the games to annoy the great man, for his face wore an angry spot, and his wife Calpurnia was pale, while the great orator Cicero had the look he put on when crossed in debate. As they went by Cassius plucked Casca by the sleeve and delayed him to know what the matter was. " Oh," said Casca, " there was a crown offered to Caesar, or a kind of crown. It was mere foolery, and I did not mark it. Antony offered it, and Caesar refused it thrice, and then he fell down in a fit." Casca had a bluff hearty manner with him, but he was really a sly unstable man who took his cue from his

JULIUS C/ESAR 45

company. " A fit ?" said Brutus: "that is likely enough, he suffers from the falling-sickness."* " Nay," interposed Cassius, with meaning, " it is not Caesar, but you and I and honest Casca here that suffer from the falling-sickness." Casca scented the hint at once, and still keeping his jolly- good-fellow-well-met way of speaking, let fall another in answer. " The tag-rag people," said he, " clapped and hissed Caesar, just as if he were playing a part ; and what's more, he gave them excuse enough, for just before he fell down he plucked open his doublet and offered me his throat to cut ! If I had only been a practical fellow instead of the easy-going one you see, . swear I'd have taken him at his word." " And when all was over," said Brutus, " Caesar came away sad, as we saw him ?" " Ay." " Did Cicero say anything ?" asked Cassius (for Cicero might or might not join the plot, and it was worth while to find out how he behaved). " Ay, he spoke Greek." " To what effect ?" " Nay," said Casca, with a shrug of the shoulders, " you mustn't ask me that. I'm a plain fellow, and it was Greek to me at any rate. There was more foolery besides, if I could remember it." " Will you dine with me to-morrow, Casca?" asked Cassius, for he saw cunning where Brutus saw bluntness only. Casca promised, and so they parted.

And during the next month Cassius was busy. He feared, on second thoughts, to trust Cicero ; but he sounded others of his acquaintance — Trebonius, Ligarius, Cinna, Decimus Brutus, Metellus Cimber — who were ready to join the plot. Their main hope, however, rested on Marcus Brutus ; for whatever their own several motives might be, they knew none but the highest would persuade him to lift a hand against Caesar, and that the people would give him credit for this. Cassius, to influence his friend, had letters and scrolls carefully prepared in different handwritings, all hinting at Caesar's ambition, and that Rome looked to Brutus for deliverance. Some of them would be thrown * A name given to the epilepsy.

46 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

in at Brutus' window, others laid among the petitions in his praetor's chair, others again pinned to the statue of his great ancestor. Every day brought a fresh shower of these letters, which Brutus believed to come honestly from the people and express their wishes.

Indeed, as often happens when treason or conspiracy is in the air, the public mind began to be disquieted with vague rumours and whisperings. Whence they came, or what they meant precisely, none knew. But folk began to talk of omens, signs of heaven, mysterious fires and meteors. A lion had been found wandering loose in the streets ; an owl had settled at noonday above the great market-place; a slave's hand had burst into flame, but when he had cast the flames from him the hand was found to be unhurt— such were the foolish tales spread and discussed. Certainly the heavens were unsettled and broke on the night before the Ides into a furious thunderstorm.

Cassius passing through the drenched streets, reckless of the lightning, to join his fellow-conspirators, ran against Casca, whom the storm and its horrors had completely terrified. He had left Casca to the last, knowing him to be easily pliable. But now the time was short. To-night the plotters were to come together and hear Brutus' final answer. It took Cassius but a few minutes to convince the shaking man that the portents at which he trembled were really directed against Caesar, to whom in the morning, if report said true, the senators meant to offer the crown ; and but a few minutes more to persuade him that he really was a bondman and owed Caesar a grudge. " I am ready," he protested, " to dare as much as Cassius in putting down the tyrant. I am no tell-tale." Cassius had his own opinion about this ; but now that the time for tale-bearing was past, disclosed the plot to him and bade him follow to the porch of Pompey's Theatre, where the conspirators were assembling to pay their visit together to Brutus' house.

JULIUS C^SAR 47

Brutus meanwhile had been passing through a terrible time. The more he pondered the more clearly he seemed to see that Caesar's life was a daily-growing menace to the welfare and liberties of Rome. " It must be by his death," he heard an inner voice whispering. Another voice would whisper that privately he could find no quarrel with Caesar. And then a third would answer that Caesar's tyranny must increase with his opportunities. "It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, and therefore," it said, "kill this serpent in the egg."

These were the thoughts which for days had kept him distracted. They allowed him no sleep to-night, but drove him from his bed long before daybreak. He wakened his young slave Lucius, and bidding him set a taper in the study, walked out into his orchard when the storm had spent itself and left the heavens clear enough for the eye to mark the meteors shooting above the dark trees.

But out here the same miserable doubts dogged and besieged him. The boy brought word that his taper was lit, and handed him a sealed paper which he had found by the window in searching for a flint. " Go back to bed," said his master, "it is not day yet. By the way, is not to-morrow the Ides of March?" "I know not, sir." " Go then first and look in the calendar, and bring me word."

He broke the seal of the paper, and read a sentence or two by the light of the trailing stars. It was another of the mysterious letters. " Brutus, thou sleepest. Awake and see thyself" — the very words might have told him who the author was. Another call to him in the name of his great ancestors to come to the rescue of Rome !

The boy, coming back to report the date, was interrupted by a knocking without. It was Cassius, with the rest of the conspirators, heavily cloaked and wrapped. By his master's order Lucius admitted them to the dark garden. Cassius made them known— Trebonius, Decimus Brutus,

48 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

Casca, Cinna, Metellus Cimber ; and then drew Brutus aside while the rest fell into constrained trivial talk which barely hid their uneasiness.

But Brutus' mind was made up. After some whispering with Cassius he came forward. " Give me your hands— no oath is necessary. We are Romans, and a promise is enough." He laid great stress on this; to him it meant everything to read in their purpose the genuine old Roman spirit. Cassius recalled him to more practical matters. "What of Cicero? Shall we sound him?" "We must not leave him out," said Casca, and Cinna and Metellus agreed. Brutus urged that Cicero was not a man to follow what others began. " Better leave him out, then," said Cassius, who mistrusted Cicero on other grounds. " No, indeed, he won't do," chimed in Casca, ready as usual to contradict himself and echo the last speaker.

Decimus Brutus wished to know if Caesar alone should be sacrificed. "Well urged," said Cassius; ('if we allow Mark Antony to live, he is just the man to do us mischief. Antony must fall too."

But this counsel revolted Brutus. " We are sacrificers and not butchers," he dwelt again on the sober justice of their purpose— as it appeared to him. He abhorred blood shed, and pleaded for no more than was necessary.

"Yet I fear him," urged the more far-sighted Cassius, " for the love he .bears to Caesar."

" Do not think of him," Brutus answered impatiently. He underrated Antony, and Cassius felt sure he was wrong, but gave way.

It was three in the morning and high time to disperse. There remained a doubt whether Caesar, who had grown suspicious of late, would not be deterred by recent omens from going to the Capitol. Decimus Brutus engaged to override any such hesitation and bring him. They left promising to send another likely conspirator— Caius Ligarius —whom Brutus was to persuade ; and with yet another

JULIUS C^SAR 49

reminder of the Roman part they were to play, he saw them through the gate.

As he turned and bent over the boy Lucius, who, having no plots or cares on his mind, had fallen into a sound sleep, Brutus' wife, Portia, came out from the house.

She was uneasy about her husband. He had been strange in his manner for many days. Men, she knew, had their dark hours, and she had waited and watched. But this trouble, it seemed, would not let him eat, or talk, or sleep. It had changed him so that only in feature was he the Brutus she knew. " Dear my lord, tell me the cause of your grief!"

" I am not well in health ; that is all."

" Is it for your health, then, that you are here abroad on this cold raw morning ? No, you have some sickness of the mind rather, which as your wife I have a right to share. See, I beg you on my knees, by the beauty you once com mended and the great vow you swore to me — your other half — that you tell me the truth. What men were here just now — men who kept their faces hidden ?"

Then, as Brutus hesitated, she reminded him that though a woman only she was Brutus' wife and Cato's daughter. " Listen," she said, "before asking to share your secret I determined to test myself, to prove if I were worthy of it. See, I took a knife and gashed myself here, in the thigh. The wound is very painful, but I have kept my lips tight, and not allowed the pain to overcome me. Now say if I cannot be trusted to keep my lips closed on your secret !"

Brutus, touched and amazed by his wife's heroism, took her in his arms, and would have told her the whole story then and there, but a knocking interrupted him, and with a hurried promise that she should know all, he dismissed her into the house just as the boy admitted the last of the con spirators, Caius Ligarius.

Nor was Portia the only wife who had slept ill on that ominous night. Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, had been tormented

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50 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

• with horrible dreams ; dreams in which she had seen her husband's statue spouting blood from a hundred wounds, while a crowd of Romans came and bathed their hands in it ; dreams so ghastly that thrice in her sleep she had started up crying for help— that Caesar was being murdered.

To unnerve her further, close upon these dreams had come early reports of the night's portents, the horrid sights seen by the watch. A lioness had whelped in the streets ; the very graves had been shaken ; the men swore to hearing noises of battle, the neighing of horses, the groans of dying men, the squealing of ghosts among the voices of the storm, and that the clouds had actually drizzled blood on the Capitol. Calpurnia had not Portia's firmness of mind. She gave herself up to terror, and protested that Caesar should not stir from the house that day.

Her fears even infected Caesar, though he would not own it to himself. He gave orders that the priests should do sacrifice and report what omens the victim yielded. Then he turned to Calpurnia. " What the gods purpose men cannot avoid. These portents are meant for all men, not specially for Caesar. But suppose them meant for me — well, cowards die many times before their death, but a brave man tastes of death once, and once only. It seems to me the strangest of all wonders that men should be fearful, seeing that a man must die and the end must come in its due time."

His servant returned with word that the augurs warned Caesar against stirring abroad that day. On plucking forth the entrails of the victim they discovered yet another portent — the heart was missing. Caesar would have made light of it. " 'Tis the gods' reproof of cowardice," he said; "I, too, should lack a heart were I to stay at home for fear." But Calpurnia besought him to stay and send word by Mark Antony that he was not well ; and Caesar, divided between a belief that he was above danger and a sense of menace in the air, was promising to humour her, when

JULIUS C^SAR 51

Decimus Brutus arrived to accompany him to the Senate- house.

" Tell them," said Caesar, " that I will not come. It were false to say I cannot, and false to say that I dare not. So say that I will not."

Decimus asked for his reasons ; and being told of Cal- purnia's fears, so well enacted his promised part of flatterer, with hints of what the Senate might say or suspect, that Caesar soon felt ashamed to have yielded to his wife's fears. " Give me my robe," said he, " I will go." And an escort of his supposed friends (for the conspirators were among them) arriving at that moment settled the matter. " Come, Antony, Cinna, Metellus ! — what, Trebonius ? You are the man I want to talk with. Keep near me that I may re member." " I will," muttered Trebonius darkly.

Caesar was to have yet another warning. One Artemido- rus, a teacher of rhetoric, had an inkling of the plot, and had posted himself in the crowd before the Capitol with a letter. The citizens cheered as the great man passed through the streets, while Brutus' wife, Portia, waited out side her door, straining her ears at every sound borne across the city from the direction of the Senate-house. She bade Lucius run thither, and broke off, forgetting she had given the boy no message to take. She read meanings into the talk of the passers-by. She breathed a prayer for Brutus, and then was terrified to think the boy had overheard it. " Run," said she, "any message ! Tell my lord I am cheer ful, and bring me back word what he answers."

Caesar, arriving before the steps of the Senate-house, spied amid the crowd there the soothsayer who had warned him against the Ides of March, and halted to throw him a rallying word. " So the Ides of March are come !"

" Ay, Caesar," answered the man, " but not gone."

Decimus Brutus stepped forward with a petition from Trebonius. At the same moment Artemidorus pressed close, and would have thrust his letter of warning into

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52 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

Caesar's hand. " Read mine first," he implored ; " mine is a suit which touches Caesar nearer." But Caesar waved it aside with a truly royal answer. " What touches us ourself shall be served last." Artemidorus was thrust back into the throng, and so the great man went up the steps, with the attendant crowd at his heels.

However anxiously some hearts were now beating in that crowd, he — the unsuspicious victim — was at ease, possessed (as never before perhaps) by the calm conscious ness of pre-eminence. The conspirators eyed each other nervously. When anyone not in the plot approached Caesar it filled them with misgivings. They had laid their plan. Trebonius was to draw off Mark Antony, and presently they saw the two step aside together. Metellus Cimber was to kneel and present a petition for the recall of his brother from banishment. Then Casca was to strike ; after him all the others. They pressed around as Cimber flung himself on his knees. Caesar guessed the nature of his petition, and would have prevented him. " Courtesies such as these might have effect upon ordinary men, not upon Caesar. If this plea be for thy brother, I spurn thee aside like a cur. Know that Csesar doth no wrong, nor will be satisfied without cause." Brutus and Cassius here pressed forward. " What, Brutus ! I tell thee that as the stars in heaven are past number, but among them only one, the pole star, is fixed and constant, so among men is only one who holds his place unassailably, unmoved and unshaken, and I am he. Hence !" as Cinna, in turn, knelt : " Wilt thou lift Mount Olympus ?" he demanded ; and turning on Decimus Brutus, " It is idle. Does not even Marcus Brutus kneel in vain ?"

" Speak, hands, for me then !" cried Casca, and stabbed him fiercely between the shoulders. As Caesar staggered, the rest ran upon him with their daggers, hewing and hacking. He turned at bay, but only to take the blow from the man he most trusted, and to look him in the eyes :

JULIUS C^SAR 53

" Thou too, Brutus ?"

And with that he covered his face and let them strike as they would, until his strength failed, and he sank in his blood upon the pavement at the foot of Pompey's statue.

" Liberty ! Freedom !" shouted the conspirators, bran dishing their daggers. But they shouted to empty benches. The scared senators had started from their seats, and were crowding in a panic for the open. The attack had been so sudden that for the moment none knew how many were in the plot, or could tell friend from foe. Cassius, turning and seeing one aged man who stood confounded and unable to flee, spoke a kind word, and hurried him after the rest. For the moment these men stood alone among the pillars of the deserted building — alone with the body of their victim. Antony had fled to his house with the running, screaming crowd. Thence he despatched a servant, who made bold to pass through the awe-stricken few who lingered outside and present himself before the group, as at Brutus' command they smeared their hands and arms with the blood of their victim. To Brutus what they had done was still a deed worthy of old Rome, and as Romans he called on them to go forward, and, waving their red weapons, cry " Freedom and liberty !" through the market-place.

The message brought by the servant was merely a plea that Antony might be allowed to come in safety and learn what manner of burial would be granted to Caesar's body. "Thy master," answered Brutus, "is a wise and valiant Roman. Tell him upon my honour that he may come and be satisfied, and shall go untouched." Brutus believed, as the messenger had indeed professed, that Antony could be won over to their side ; but Cassius had his misgivings.

Antony soon arrived, and seeming not to hear Brutus' salutation, knelt first beside Caesar's body. "I know not," said he, looking up from his farewell, and letting fall the cloak he had lifted from the dead face, " I know- not what you intend, gentlemen, or what other blood must be shed.

54 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

For myself there is no fitter hour to die than this, and no place will please me so much as here, by Caesar."

Brutus assured him they had no such intent. " Though we must seem to you bloody and cruel, look not at our hands, but at our hearts rather. It is for pity we have done this— pity for Rome. Against you we have no malice at all."

" Join us," said Cassius, who better understood the man they were dealing with, " and your voice shall be as power ful as any man's in disposing of new dignities."

Antony put this aside. The part he had to play was that of a true friend and admirer of Caesar stunned by the shock of the murder, yet willing to believe that other men were wiser than he in his fondness could be. He took the hand of each conspirator in turn, and then seemed to break down under the thought that these hands had just murdered his friend. " Pardon me, Julius ! So it was here they brought thee to bay ; here thy hunters stand red with blood, and thou liest among them like a royal stag struck down by many princes !"

" Mark Antony " interrupted Cassius. But again

Antony seemed to misunderstand him.

" Pardon me, Caius Cassius ; even an enemy might say this. How much more a friend such as I was ?"

" I blame you not for praising Caesar. But I am im patient to know what compact you mean to have with us, and if we may depend on you."

" It was for that I shook hands with you; but the sight of Caesar distracted me. Yes, I am friends with you all if you will tell me why and in what Caesar was so dangerous."

"Certainly," put in Brutus, "this would indeed be a savage spectacle if we could give no reasons for it ; but we can — reasons that would satisfy you were you Caesar's own son."

"That is all I ask; except this, that I may carry his body to the market-place and, as becomes a friend, make my speech among the funeral rites in due course."

JULIUS C/ESAR 55

" You shall," promised Brutus ; but Cassius drew him aside. " You know not what you are promising," he whispered. " Do not consent to this. Consider how he may move the people." But Brutus never doubted that, his own reasons being good, he had only to state them to convince everybody. " By your leave," said he, " I will myself mount the pulpit first and show what reasons we had for Caesar's death ; and explain that what Antony may say is said by our permission. It will do us more advantage than harm to show our wish that Caesar should be buried with all lawful ceremonies."

Cassius was discontented, but gave way again ; and Antony readily accepted the conditions. The conspirators left him to prepare the body. Sinking on his knees beside it, he begged its dumb forgiveness that he must behave so meekly and gently with " these butchers." Then after prophetic promise of the curse this murder should bring upon Rome and Italy, he rose, despatched a messenger to Octavius, Caesar's adopted son, and, lifting the body, bore it out to the market-place.

Brutus had already mounted the rostrum and was addressing the crowd. And the crowd listened approvingly, because they respected his character ; but his formal sentences did not kindle them. " Romans, countrymen, and lovers! my appeal is to your judgment. If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love for Caesar was no less than his. If, then, that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer : not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men ? . . . , Who is here so base that he would be a bond man ? Who so rude that he would not _be a Roman ? Who so vile that he will not love his country ? If any, speak ; for him have I offended. I pause fora reply."

This was speaking " like a book," as we say. The im-

56 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

pressed but slightly puzzled crowd, finding an answer expected, cried, after a moment, " None, Brutus, none !"

" Then I have offended none," the speaker argued, and was enlarging on the necessity of Caesar's death when Antony arrived with his fellow-mourners bearing Caesar's body in sad procession. Here was a far more effective appeal than cold logic, had Brutus known men well enough ; but he was blind to it. " With this 1 depart," he went on, "that as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself when it Shall please my country to need my death."

" Live, Brutus ! live !" shouted the mob. And some were for escorting him home in triumph, others for giving him a statue with his ancestors. " Let him be Caesar !" shouted one ; while another, even more sapient, suggested " Caesar's better parts shall be crowned in Brutus." Com ments so ignorant might have warned him of the mistake he made in relying on their reasonableness. But the warn ing was wasted. Begging them to listen to what Antony might have to say, he stepped down from the rostrum and withdrew, chivalrously leaving the coast clear.

There was some disturbance when Antony mounted the steps to speak. The mob was persuaded after a fashion that Caesar had been a tyrant, and that Rome was well rid of him. " He'd best speak no harm of Brutus here," threatened the sapient citizen who had suggested crowning Caesar's better parts. But having obtained silence, Antony knew better than to begin by attacking Brutus.

" Friends, Romans, countrymen," he began, " attend ! I am here to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil which men do survives them ; the good is often laid away under earth with their bones. Let it be so with Caesar. He was ambitious, the noble Brutus has told you. If that were so, it was a grievous fault, and Caesar has paid for it grievously. Here, by leave of Brutus and the rest— for Brutus is a man of honour, and so are they all, all men

JULIUS C^SAR 57

of honour — I am come merely to speak the last words over my friend.

" For he was my friend, and to me faithful and just ; though Brutus- -who is a man of honour — says he was ambitious. He brought, in his time, many captives home to this city, and poured their ransoms into the public coffers. When the poor have cried, Caesar has wept for them. It is hard to detect ambition in all this ; but Brutus — who is a man of honour — says he was ambitious. You all saw how at the Lupercalia I thrice offered him the kingly crown, and how he refused it thrice. Was this ambition ? Brutus says so ; and to be sure, he is a man of honour. But I am not here to disprove what Brutus told you. I am here merely to tell you what I know. You all loved him once — not without cause. Can you not mourn for him ? Oh, have men lost all their judgment, all their reason !" He paused as one surprised at his own out burst. ". Bear with me, friends ; my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar. Grant me a while to pause and recover it !"

His listeners were moved already. " There is reason in what he says." " Caesar has had a great wrong, if you con sider." " We may have a worse master than Caesar." " He refused the crown — so he did — so 'tis plain he couldn't have been ambitious." " Poor soul ! look at his eyes, red as fire!" "There's not a nobler man in all Rome than Antony !" Thus they murmured together, while Antony conquered his emotion and prepared to speak again.

" But yesterday," he went on, " the word of Caesar might have weighed against the whole world. Now he lies there with none — -not the poorest — to do him reverence. Sirs, if I were disposed to stir you to mutiny and rage I should be wronging Brutus and Cassius — who, as you know, are men of honour. I will not do this. I choose rather to wrong the dead, to wrong myself, to wrong you, than to wrong such men of honour ! But here I have Caesar's will.

58 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

If I were to read it to you— but, pardon me, I do not mean to— I say if I were to read it you would run to kiss Caesar's wounds, to dip your handkerchiefs in his blood —

"The will! read the will!" shouted the people; but Antony protested that he must not; it was not meet for them to hear how much Caesar loved them ; it would in flame them, make them mad. There was no saying what might come of it.

" Read the will ! Read it !" they clamoured.

But again he protested ; he had gone too far in speaking of it ; he feared, indeed he did, that he was wronging the men of honour — whose daggers had stabbed Caesar.

" The will ! the will ! ' Men of honour !' Traitors ! Read the will !"

" You force me to read it ? Then come, make a ring about Caesar's corpse while I show you him who made the will." He stepped down from the rostrum, and as they gathered and pressed about him, he lifted the mantle from the body. " You all know this mantle. I remember the first time Caesar put it on — one summer's evening, in his tent. It was the day he overcame the Nervii." He showed them the holes made by the daggers ; where Cassius had stabbed, and Casca, and Brutus — "the well-beloved Brutus," " Caesar's angel "— " ah, that was the unkindest blow ! That was the heart-breaking stroke ! Then it was that great Caesar covered his face and fell !" His hearers were weep ing by this time, and he could be bold. " Fell ? Ay, and what a fall ! My countrymen, then it was that I and you and all of us fell, while treason and bloodshed flourished over us. You weep at sight of his garments merely ! Look you here then on him— marred, as you behold, by traitors !"

They were mad now. They shouted for revenge. " Fire !" " Kill !" " Slay !" " Death to the traitors !" But Antony, who had worked them to frenzy with such masterly art, must perfect that frenzy before letting them slip.

" Good friends, sweet friends, I must not stir you up so.

JULIUS C^SAR 59

The men who have done this deed are men of honour. What private griefs they had against Caesar to make them do it, I know not, alas ! But as men of honour they will give you their reasons. You see, I am no orator like Brutus !" — indeed he was not ! — " but, as you all know me, a plain blunt man, who love my friend, and have permission to speak. For I have no gifts of eloquence to set men's blood stirring. I only speak right on, telling you what you know already, showing you Caesar's wounds, and bidding them speak for me. Were I Brutus now, I could put a tongue into every wound of Caesar that should move the very stones of Rome to rise in revolt."

" And so will we !" " Burn the house of Brutus !" "Down with the conspirators !" Antony had to shout for a hearing. " Why, friends, you are going to do you know not what ! Nay, you scarce know yet how much cause you have to love Caesar. You have forgotten the will I told you of."

" True— the will ! Read the will !"

" Here is the will, then, sealed by Caesar. It gives to every Roman citizen a legacy of seventy-five drachmas," — again the hubbub was deafening — " and to the citizens in general he bequeaths his gardens and orchards beyond Tiber, to them and their heirs for their recreation for ever. . . ."

They listened for no more. They rushed on the market place, tearing up benches, stalls, tables, and heaping the wreckage for a funeral pile. They laid the body of Caesar on it and set fire to the mass ; and as it grew hot they plucked out the blazing brands and rushed off towards the conspirators' houses, yelling for revenge. Antony could watch now. He had done his work, and done it thoroughly.

But the conspirators had been warned, and by this time were riding through the gates in hot haste. They drew rein at Antium. The mob, after all, was but a mob ; and, though Antony doubtless coveted Caesar's place, before he could aspire to it he must win the army. The senatorial

60 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

party on the whole supported the conspirators; for when Brutus and the rest talked of Roman liberty, what they meant was the privileges of the old Roman families, which still composed the Senate, not the rights of the populace. It was the senate, not the populace, which had resented Caesar's absolute power, and for their deliverance the blow had been struck. Officially the senators had, by law and in name at any rate, the army on their side ; for by law the chief magistrates took command of the forces. So the con spirators had much in their favour.

Between these two parties — Antony and the mob on one side, and the majority of the Senate on the other — stood the young Octavius, Caesar's grand-nephew and heir, with an army at his back ; a young man, not yet twenty, but wiser than other young men, with a handsome, expressionless, inscrutable face, a heart without feeling, and a temper inhumanely cold and obstinate— an enigma to all, and as yet perhaps even to himself. Brutus and the rest had made the grand mistake of conspirators ; they had supposed that by killing a great man they could destroy the forces which made him. Driven from Caesar's dead body, these forces gathered again and centred upon Caesar's young heir, and henceforth this statue of a youth is propelled by them and moves as a man of fate.

At first Octavius inclined towards the senatorial party. Brutus and Cassius went off to their provinces in the East. In Italy Antony might have been crushed had the Senate followed a fixed plan or dared to trust Octavius ; but dis trust and divisions palsied their policy and the movements of their troops. Octavius saw that he could make nothing of them. On the other hand, by combining with Antony he could crush them in Italy, and then turn upon Brutus and Cassius in the East. As for Antony — well, time would show.

The two chiefs met, and took into their counsels one Marcus ^milius Lepidus— a weak man, but a name of weight and influence with the popular party. The three

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appointed themselves to a Triumvirate — in other words, a three-man dictatorship — and divided up the Roman Empire between them as though it had been their own inheritance. To effect this, however, certain prominent men had to be got rid of, and each Triumvir was naturally anxious to shield his own friends. At length, however, by bartering their separate friendships against their hatreds, they " pro scribed" or marked down and put to death all who were likely to interfere with their plans. Octavius handed over Cicero to Antony, who in turn sacrificed Lucius Caesar, his uncle on his mother's side ; while Lepidus, to his peculiar shame, suffered his own brother Paulus to be pricked down on the list. Having thus by wholesale murder cleared the coast in Italy, they could turn securely upon Brutus and Cassius in the East.

And in the East Brutus was beginning to learn that the philosophy found in books will not carry a man through the business of statecraft, especially when one is conducting a revolution. He wanted money, and pressed Cassius for money. He would have no unjust tolls levied in his own province, and disgraced his subordinate, Lucius Pella, on finding him guilty of pilfering the inhabitants of Sardis. Yet he must have known, had he considered, that if Cassius had money to spare it was only by behaving less scrupu lously. This punishment of Pella annoyed Cassius, who took it for a reflection upon himself, having dealt leniently a few days before with two of his own officers similarly convicted. At Brutus' request he came with his army to Sardis to clear up misunderstandings. The two friends met coldly, for Cassius was genuinely incensed and made no secret of his feelings.

Brutus, however, led him to his own tent, and setting a watch on the door bade him speak out his complaints.

"You have wronged me," said Cassius, "in disgracing Lucius Pella and making light of the letters I sent appealing for him."

62 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

"You wronged yourself, rather, to write in such a

case."

''This is no time for laying stress on every petty

offence."

Now Brutus was suffering and hiding a private sorrow of which his friend knew nothing. Under such trials the tempers of good men grow infirm.

" Let me tell you," he broke out violently, " you yourself, Cassius, are accused of an itching palm — of trafficking your offices for gold to unworthy men !"

" I ! an itching palm !" Cassius sprang up indignant, blankly astonished. " You know you are Brutus who utter the words, or by the gods that speech were your last !"

" The name of Cassius honours this corrupt dealing, and therefore it goes without chastisement." " Chastisement !"

But Brutus was not to be checked. " Remember March — remember the Ides of March ! Why did Caesar bleed, but for justice ? Was there a man of us stabbed him except for justice ?" Cassius winced. " What ! Shall one of us who smote down the foremost man in the world because he supported robbers— shall we, I say, now be contaminating our fingers with base bribes ? I'd rather be a dog than such a Roman !"

We may pity Cassius now. The ablest, shrewdest, most practical of all the conspirators, he had one soft place in his heart — his admiring love for his friend. Time after time he had given way to Brutus — in sparing Antony, in allowing Antony to harangue the crowd, he had given way against his judgment ; and always the event proved that he had been right and Brutus wrong. His respect for Brutus was a kind of superstition. And here he was being preached at and pelted with opprobrious words by the friend who had been pressing him for money, being too moral himself to raise money in the only way it could be raised ! It was intolerable, and he felt it so.

JULIUS C^SAR 63

" Brutus, bait me not, for I'll not endure it. You forget yourself ! I am a soldier, older in practice than you, and abler to make conditions."

Brutus caught him up. " What, you abler ?" " Do not tempt me further." Cassius pleaded. " You abler ?" Brutus replied with sneer upon sneer : " You a better soldier ?" " I said an elder soldier, not a better one. Did I say better ?" " If you did, I care not. . . . You threaten me ? I am armed so strong in honesty, your threats go by me like so much wind," — and Brutus began to twit him with refusing the money, "/can raise no money by vile means, /had rather coin my blood than wring the vile stuff from these peasants. You know this, and yet when I asked you for money you refused me ! Was this done like Cassius ?" Cassius answered simply that he had not refused the money (which, in fact, was true). " You did !" "I did not. It was a fool who brought you my answer. A friend should bear the infirmities of a friend, but you, Brutus, make mine greater than they are. Come, Antony ! Come, Octavius ! revenge yourself on Cassius alone ! He is weary of this world ; hated by the man he loves ; checked like any slave ; all his faults set down, noted, learned by rote, cast in his teeth. Here is my dagger and here my breast, naked ! I denied your gold ? Take my heart, then. Strike, as you struck Caesar."

Brutus was softened, though as yet far from convinced he was in the wrong. " Sheathe your dagger. I must bear with you; I cannot carry my anger long." "And must I live to be mocked and laughed at by Brutus ?" "I was ill-tempered," Brutus admitted. " You confess so much ? Give me your hand." " And my heart too." They had come thus near to being reconciled when a noise at the tent-door interrupted them, and in broke a crazy follower of Brutus, one Marcus Phaonius, who set up to be a philosopher, but from his eccentric behaviour was more often regarded as a fool. This fellow had heard that the two generals were

64 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

quarrelling ; and, pushing past the guards, he struck an attitude and began to recite certain verses of Homer, full of wise counsel, but with such extravagant gestures that Cassius burst out laughing while Brutus angrily hustled the fellow from the room.

Nothing cleanses the temper like a hearty laugh. Brutus, still frowning, called for a bowl of wine. "I did not think," said his friend, " you could have been so angry." " O Cassius," came the confession, " I am sick of many griefs."

" You — a Stoic — should make use of your philosophy."

"I do. No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead."

" Portia !"

" She is dead."

So this was the explanation . . . Cassius sat stunned. " How did I escape killing," he murmured, " when I crossed you so ?"

Heart-broken with grief for her husband's absence and the forces gathering under Octavius and Antony to over whelm him, Portia had lost her reason and taken her own life. Brutus told of it in a dull, level voice. It was Cassius who broke out with exclamations ; not he to whom she had been dear above living things.

" Speak no more of her," he said, as the boy Lucius entered with the wine. The two friends drank to their love before admitting the captains to consider with them the plan of campaign.

At first, while Brutus discussed the latest news received of their enemies, Cassius sat dazed and inattentive, mutter ing of Portia's loss. He roused himself for a moment on hearing that Cicero too had perished — " proscribed " by the Triumvirs ; but it was a direct question from Brutus which fully awoke him. "Octavius and Antony were marching upon Philippi, on the border between Thrace and Macedonia. What did Cassius think of crossing over to Europe and encountering them there ?"

JULIUS C/ESAR 65

Cassius was opposed to this. It was better to let the enemy weary himself and exhaust his means on long marches than to go and save his labour by meeting him.

But Brutus made little of these reasons. The people in Asia Minor were disaffected already and grudged their contributions. Octavius and Antony would enlist recruits as they came, and therefore were better met and opposed as soon as possible.

Cassius would have argued. Once more he was right, and Brutus wrong ; but either the old admiration blinded him, or he was passing weary of altercations. He gave way; the march was fixed for the morrow, and with the friendliest good-nights they parted.

It was late when the council broke up, and Brutus was left alone. A sense of calamity lay heavy on him. He called for two soldiers, Varro and Claudius, to sleep within his tent-door. They were willing to stand and watch ; but he would not have it so, being always a kind master. His slave Lucius brought him his gown and book ; the poor boy was heavy with want of sleep. With some self-reproach, Brutus begged him to take his lute and play. Lucius would do far more than this for the master he loved ; and began to sing, touching the strings drowsily, while the two soldiers slept. The instrument almost slipped from his hand. Brutus took it gently from him, and the boy's head fell back on the pillow. And now the master alone kept watch, holding his book close to a solitary taper.

Minutes past ; by and by — was the taper burning ill, or was there a shadow deepening beyond it ? He looked up. It was a shadow, but it had shape — likeness ; it was dead Caesar standing there ! Brutus' blood ran cold as he stared at the apparition. It seemed to him that he found voice to challenge it. " Speak — what art thou ?"

" Thy evil spirit, Brutus."

" Why comest thou ?"

" To warn thee thou shalt see me again — at Philipph"

5

66 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

Between dread and scorn of himself and incredulity Brutus echoed the words stupidly, almost with a laugh.

" At Philippi," the vision repeated.

" Why, I will see thee then, at Philippi " — Brutus brought his fist down on the table, calling " Lucius ! Varro ! Claudius ! Awake there !" — and looked again. The vision had vanished.

" The strings are out of tune, my lord," muttered the boy Lucius drowsily.

Brutus awoke him ; awoke the two soldiers. " Why had they cried out in their sleep ? what had they seen ?" They had seen nothing. Had they cried out? It was strange ; but indeed they had seen nothing.

Had Brutus, too, seen nothing ? Perhaps. But the spirit of Caesar — all that Caesar had stood for, all that he had meant upon earth— awaited them on the plains of Philippi towards which Brutus and Cassius set forth next day. They said little to one another as they and their legions marched deeper into what they felt to be the shadow of doom. When they had crossed the straits and were face to face with their enemies' tents, that shadow hung visible over them. During the march out from Sardis two eagles had perched on their banners and fed from the soldiers' hands. But at Philippi these birds of good omen had taken their departure, and now in their place the air was darkened with a flock of ravens, crows, and kites gathered from every quarter to forestall the grim feast preparing.

Nor did the two generals wear the mood of happy assurance. On the morning of the fight they took leave of each other bravely, as men should, but solemnly, as men prepared for the worst. If victory should be theirs, with the gods' help, then they might meet again with smiles and live all the rest of their days quietly one with another. If not — then this day would end the work begun on the Ides of March. No conqueror should ever have the joy of

JULIUS C^SAR 67

leading Brutus and Cassius in triumph. And upon this they took their farewells.

In the ordering of the battle Brutus found himself opposed by Octavius, Cassius by Antony. The two Triumvirs were never in hearty agreement from the first. Destiny alone bound them together for the time. Their natures were opposed in all respects. The elder man, eager, talented, and pleasure-loving, girded against the lad who was young enough to be his son but who went his own way so calmly and with a sort of bloodless self-possession. Antony had wished to oppose Brutus. " Why do you cross me ?" he complained on finding that Octavius had arranged otherwise. " I do not cross you," replied Octavius, as if it did not admit of argument ; " but I will have it so." Antony said no more.

Brutus finding Octavius' forces at a disadvantage, gave the word to charge ; and his haste would have been justified — for his men at the first assault drove their enemies back with great slaughter — had it not taken Cassius unawares. As it was, Cassius' men gave ground before Antony's attack. He rallied them only to find himself hemmed round. Brutus should have relieved him at this point, and the day would have been won ; but his men were plundering and killing among Octavius' tents, and he could not recall them in time. Cassius' cavalry were in full flight for the coast ; he did what he could to hold his infantry firm, and snatching an ensign from one of the standard-bearers, planted it for a rallying mark, and fought on in hope of the assistance which did not come.

At length, however, he was forced to pluck up his standard and withdraw, with a few about him, to a little hill which gave a prospect over the plain. His sight was weak, but he could see his own tents blazing while Antony's soldiery pillaged through them. He made out also a troop of horsemen galloping towards him, and doubtful whether they were friends or foes, sent one of his companions,

5—2

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Titinius, to make sure. Meanwhile his servant Pindarus had climbed to the summit of the hill for a better view.

The advancing horsemen had in fact been sent by Brutus, though too late. Perceiving Titinius, and knowing him for one of Cassius' friends, they raised a great shout of welcome, with boastings of their victory. But Pindarus on the hill, hearing the noise and seeing Titinius surrounded, made sure that he was taken prisoner, and called down this news to Cassius. " Come down," commanded his master. The two were alone. " In Parthia I made thee prisoner, and in return for thy life took an oath from thee that whatsoever I might bid thou wouldst do. Take thy liberty now, and this sword — the sword that stabbed Caesar. Smite, I command thee ; now, as I cover my face." Pindarus drove the sword home, and then, as his master fell dead, cast it from him and ran ; nor was he ever seen again.

So it happened that Titinius returning crowned with a wreath of victory and impatient to tell his good news, stumbled on his master stretched dead upon the hillside. The garland was useless now. Titinius bound it reverently on the senseless brow, and forthwith, like a stern Roman, slew himself upon the body ; there to be found a little later by Brutus and his attendants. With bent head Brutus uttered the last farewell over his friend—" the last of all the Romans," he called him. " Friends, I owe this dead man more tears than ever you shall see me pay. I shall find time, Cassius; I shall find time."

In truth, as he said, the spirit of Caesar still walked the earth and turned the conspirators' swords against them selves. Brutus' own time was not long. The first battle having proved indecisive, he offered fight again— to be driven from the field with a few remaining followers. One by one he drew them aside and entreated them to perform for him the office which Pindarus had performed for Cassius. Each shook his head ; they loved him too well. It was a servant who at length, turning his head aside, held

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the sword on which Brutus flung himself — more gladly, he said, than he had lifted it against Caesar.

Even his enemies respected the body, and gave it burial with full honours. " This," said Antony, " was the noblest Roman of them all. All the conspirators save him did what they did in envy of Caesar's greatness. He alone joined them in honest motive and thought for the common good. His life was gentle, and himself so composed, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ' This was a man !' "

KING JOHN

HENRY II., King of England, was lord not of England only, but of a good third of what we call France. If you take a map of France and draw a line from Boulogne due south to the Pyrenees, you may say roughly that the country east of it was swayed by the King of France, and the country west of it by the King of England.

From his mother Matilda, daughter of our Henry I., he inherited the dukedom of Normandy as well as the crown of England ; from his father Anjou, Maine, and Touraine ; and his marriage with Elinor, Duchess of Aquitaine, brought him the seven provinces of the south — Poitou, Saintonge, the Angoumois, La Marche, the Limousin, Perigord, and Gascony.

Through his father— Geoffrey, the handsome Plantagenet, Count of Anjou — Henry came of one of the most notable and terrible races in history ; a race descended from a wild Breton woodman who had helped the French king against the Danes and won for himself a grant of broad lands beside the Loire ; a race half-savage, utterly unscrupulous, and abominably shrewd ; great fighters to begin with, afterwards great generals, schemers, and controllers of men ; outwardly good-natured and charming, but at heart lustful, selfish monstrous in greed, without natural affection and indifferent to honour ; scoffers at holiness, yet slavishly superstitious ; and withal masterful men of affairs, sticking at no crime or treason which might help their ends. Such was the character fatally handed down from father to son. Henry inherited his share of it, and passed it on to his sons, who broke his

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heart by their hatreds and conspiracies against him ; but the son whose treachery darkened his last hour was his favourite, John.

Of these sons we are only concerned with three — Richard Cceur de Lion ; Geoffrey Duke of Brittany ; and John. On his father's death, Richard — who had hastened it by in triguing with the King of France — succeeded to the throne. Geoffrey was already dead, but had left a young son, Arthur, of whom we are to hear. Richard reigned for ten years, of which he spent just six months in England. He was a brave soldier but a detestably bad king. He looked on war as a sport, and to feed that sport in foreign countries he drained England by the cruellest taxes, which he repaid with misgovernment, or rather with no government at all. To him England, whose crown he wore, was a foreign land. Now to John — who remained at home while Richard went crusading — England was not a foreign land, not a country of second importance. John was the shrewdest as well as the wickedest of his shrewd and wicked race, and alone of that race he valued England aright. We shall have to hate him ; but let this be set to his credit against his black sins. He was the first of our kings to teach England — by bitter suffering, indeed, but still he taught her— to stand up for herself and defy the world.

When Richard died of an arrow-wound received while he was attacking the Castle of Chalus in the Limousin for some treasure he supposed it to contain, John, who had long been plotting against him at home, seized his opportunity and the crown of England.

Pie had no right to it. The true heir was young Arthur, son of his elder brother Geoffrey. But John was here on the spot, and he had his mother Elinor's support — for with her, as with the father he injured, he had always been the favourite son. England acknowledged him ; Normandy acknowledged him ; and in the south of France his mother held Aquitaine secure for him.

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On the other hand Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to young Arthur; and Philip, King of France, stood forward to champion his cause — not, as we shall see, from any burning sense of justice, but calculating perhaps that on his borders so young and gentle a lad would be a more comfortable neighbour than the ruthless and sinister John. At any rate, in answer to the entreaties of Constance, Arthur's mother, he made a fine show of indignation and sent his ambassador Chatillon to, demand the surrender of John's claims.

" What follows," asked John grimly, " if we refuse ?"

" Fierce and bloody war," replied Chatillon, " proudly to control you and enforce the rights you withhold by force."

" Here we have war for war, blood for blood, control- ment for control ment. Take that answer to France ; and take it swiftly. For be you swift as lightning, the thunder of my cannon shall be quick on your heels."

And John was as good as his word. Chatillon, delayed by contrary winds, had scarcely time to reach France and report this defiance to his master before John had collected troops and was after him.

The ambassador found King Philip, with Constance, Arthur, and his forces, collected before the walls of Angiers, the capital of Anjou and birthplace of the Plantagenets. The unhappy citizens of that town saw themselves, as we say, between the devil and the deep sea. To acknowledge Arthur, to acknowledge John, seemed equally hazardous ; and an error in deciding would assuredly mean their ruin. With admirable prudence, therefore, they had closed their gates against both parties, and postponed the ticklish business of declaring their preference until events should determine which side was likely to win.

This hesitancy of theirs naturally annoyed Philip, who had by his side, to support Arthur's cause, the Viscount of Limoges— though the real importance of this nobleman counted as nothing to his importance in his own conceit.

KING JOHN 7H

As friend of the family to a Plantagenet he was enacting a new part. For it was by an arrow-shot from his Castle of Chalus that Richard Cceur de Lion had perished.

This was hardly an affair to brag about ; but in honour of it Limoges ever after wore a lion's skin across his shoulders, and was swaggering now in this cloak while pro fessing his love for Richard's nephew. But if the part he enacted was new, he seemed to feel it a magnanimous one, and promised Arthur his help and received the thanks of Constance with the air of a man who has reason to be pleased with himself and believe Heaven pleased with him.

While Philip was making up his mind to batter the obstinate town into submission, Chatillon arrived with his report and the news that John had crossed the Channel and was following upon Angiers by forced marches, bring ing with him his mother Elinor, a very goddess of discord stirring him up to blood and strife ; his niece Blanch, daughter of his sister Elinor and King Alphonso of Castile ; and a whole crowd of dauntless volunteers who had sold their fortunes in England to equip themselves and win new and greater fortunes in France.

Chatillon spoke truth. Before Philip could bend his artillery against the walls, John arrived with his host and brought the French to parley. There was little to argue. Philip took his stand upon Arthur's plain right to inherit. ." Geoffrey was thy elder brother, and this is his son. England was Geoffrey's right, and this is Geoffrey's." " Whence hast thou commission to lay down a law and condemn me by it ?" was all that John could demand in reply. " From that supernal Judge," answered Philip, " who stirs good thoughts in the breast of any man holding strong authority, and bids him see to it when the right is defaced or stained. That Judge has made me this boy's guardian ; under His warrant I impeach the wrong you are doing, and by His help I mean to chastise it." The parley might have ended here had not the dispute been fiercely

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taken up by the tongues of the women, Elinor on the one side, Constance on the other. Limoges in his character of family friend was ill-advised enough to interpose between them, crying " Peace !" " Hear the crier !" exclaimed a mocking voice at his elbow. The insulted noble turned round, demanding who dared thus to interrupt, and found himself face to face with a bluff and burly Englishman, a soldier commanding in John's army, Robert Faulconbridge by name.

Now this Faulconbridge was a son of Richard Cceur de Lion's, born out of wedlock. Like his father, he loved fighting for its own sake, and like a true Englishman he loved his country. So when John offered him service abroad, these two passions of his jumped together, and he readily gave up all claim to his estates at home and took the knighthood held out to him as his reward. The honour, as he confessed, he might learn to rise to. It was his humour to make himself out a rough and careless free-lance. But this blunt humour covered a real earnestness, and to see his father's memory insulted by this Limoges with the lion's skin was more than he could endure.

" Who is this fellow ?" demanded Limoges.

" One that will soon let you know, sir, if I can catch you and that hide of yours alone. I'll tan that skin-coat for you, I promise you. So look to it!" and Faulconbridge rated him until the ladies of John's train began to join in the sport. "See," went on Faulconbridge, "the ass in lion's clothing! Ass, I'll take that burden off you, never fear, or lay on another that your shoulders shall feel !"

Limoges turned away in disgust; and Philip calling silence on this noisy diversion, demanded if John would resign his usurped titles and lay down his arms. " My life as soon!" John retorted, and called on Arthur to submit, promising him more by way of recompense than ever the coward hand of France could win for him. Elinor, too, urged Arthur to submit. " Do, child," mimicked Constance,

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using such prattle as is used to children. " Go to it grandam ; give grandam kingdom, and grandam will give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig; there's a good grandam." The women's tongues broke loose again. Philip with difficulty cried them down at length, and bade a trumpet be blown to summon the citizens of Angiers to the parley.

The citizens appeared on the walls, and John and Philip in turn urged them by threats and persuasion to make their decision. The citizens made answer that they would acknowledge neither John nor Arthur until one had proved himself the stronger ; for him they reserved their sub mission. In this resolution they were obstinate, and the two parties drew off to array their armies for the test of combat.

But the engagement which followed was indecisive. Each side claimed some trifling success, and on the strength of their claims the heralds of France and England were soon under the walls once more urging the citizens to decide. The citizens, who had watched the fight with impartial minds and from a capital position, made answer to the heralds and to the impatient kings who followed, that in their opinion no advantage had been gained by either party, and that they abode by their determination to keep their gates barred.

On hearing this answer it occurred to the pugnacious Faulconbridge to recollect that once upon a time the factions in Jerusalem under John of Giscala and Simon bar-Gioras had ceased their assaults upon each other to combine in resisting the Romans. He suggested that this example from history was worth copying, and that by first combining their forces to batter down Angiers, France and England would clear the ground for settling their own quarrel. To this wild counsel, as its author modestly called it, Philip and John were the more readily disposed to listen because in fact there appeared no other way out of a some what ludicrous fix.

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Hitherto the citizens of Angiers had found the easiest policy — that of sitting still and waiting — the wisest. But now they saw clearly it was high time for them in their turn to make a suggestion ; for if the two kings listened to Faulconbridge, as they seemed not averse from doing, Angiers was doomed.

So their spokesman craved leave for a word, and it was granted. This astute burgess saw well enough that the real decision for Angiers lay, not between Arthur and John, its rightful and its wrongful sovereign, but between the army of Philip and the army of John. From the beginning he had pledged the town to accept as in the right the claimant which should prove the stronger ; and from this there was but a short step to the proposal he now made, which with out any regard for right was simply aimed to get both armies on the same side.

" See," said he, " on one side here is the Lady Blanch, the niece of England ; on the other, Lewis, the Dauphin of France. Where could be sought and found a couple more clearly suited each for the other ? Unite them, and you unite two divided excellences, which only need union to be perfection ; you join two silver currents such as together glorify the banks that bound them in." It was a shameless proposal, but the speaker was addressing shameless ears, and did not allow this to trouble him. Indeed his eloquence began to carry him away. " Marry them," said he, " and their union shall do more than battery upon our gates. But without this match the sea enraged is not half so deaf, nor are lions more confident, nor mountains and rocks more immovable ; no, nor is Death himself in mortal fury one- half so peremptory, as we are to keep this city !"

" Dear, dear !" commented Faulconbridge, who had a natural prejudice against any scheme likely to dissuade from fighting, and perhaps a leaning of his own towards the love of the Lady Blanch, " here's a large mouth indeed ! It spits forth death and mountains, rocks and seas, and talks

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as familiarly of roaring lions as maids of thirteen talk of puppy-dogs I Zounds ! in all my born days I was never so bethumped with words I"

But the speaker knew what ears he was addressing. First Elinor advised her son to grasp the offer. She saw that Philip was wavering ; perceived him already whispering with his advisers; noted that he glanced about him, and that Arthur and Constance were not present to harden him in the right. " Will their Majesties answer me ?" asked the voice upon the wall. " Let England speak first," said wavering Philip. And John on this invitation spoke ; offering Anjou, Touraine, Maine, Poictiers for the bride's dowry. The bribe was too much for Philip ; the young couple professed themselves willing ; Angiers opened her gates. Philip had one spasm of contrition for the widow and the widow's son he was betraying ; but John quickly silenced his regrets. " Arthur shall be Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond, as well as lord of this fair town. If we cannot fulfil all the Lady Constance's wishes, we will at least give enough to silence her exclamations." The whole party passed through the gates to solemnise the contract without loss of time, leaving that rough soldier Faulcon- bridge to muse alone on the power of Self-Interest, that goddess who persuades men to break their vows, and kings to do off the armour which conscience has buckled on. But Faulconbridge had perhaps more than one reason for being out of temper.

To the Earl of Salisbury fell the thankless errand of carrying the news to Constance as she sat with her son in the French king's pavilion. Her outcries were terrible and pitiful too. " Gone to be married ! Gone to swear a truce — to join false blood with false blood !" She would not believe it. She turned fiercely on the Earl, and then read ing the truth in his looks, fell to caressing and fondly lamenting over her boy. "Begone!" she commanded Salisbury, " leave me alone with my woes."

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" Pardon me, madam," he answered, " I may not return without you."

"Thou mayst — thou shalt. I will not go. Grief so great as mine is proud," and she seated herself upon the ground. " Here," said she, " I and sorrows sit. Here is my throne; go bid kings come and bow before it !"

Terrible were the curses she uttered when the kings with the bridal train returned from the ceremony and found her seated thus ; curses and prayers for discord between them, swiftly to be fulfilled. The officious Limoges again tried to pacify her, and again most ill-advisedly, for she turned on him and withered him with contemptuous fury. He was a coward, ever strong upon the stronger side ; a champion who never fought but when fighting was safe ; a ramping, bragging, fool ; a loud-mouthed promiser, who fell away from his promises. " Thou wear a lion's hide ! Do it off for shame, and hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs !"

Limoges was stung. " If a man," he sputtered, "dared to say those words to me !"

" And hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs," spoke a cool voice at his elbow, and there stood Faulconbridge ready for him.

It was maddening. "Villain! for thy life thou darest not say so !"

" And— hang— a calf-skin— on — those — recreant— limbs,' repeated Faulconbridge imperturbably.

John had scarcely time to call peace between them before a newcomer was announced — Pandulph, the legate of Pope Innocent the Third. The Pope had grave cause of anger against John. After the death of Hubert Walter, Arch bishop of Canterbury, John had forced the monks of Christ- church to accept a creature of his own, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, as Primate. Innocent set aside the election, and consecrated Stephen Langton, a cardinal and thorough churchman, as archbishop. John refused to allow Stephen to set foot in England, drove out the monks

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of Christchurch, quartered a troop of soldiers in their cloisters, and confiscated their lands. Innocent threatened excommunication, and now sent Pandulph to demand in the Pope's name why John had not submitted.

This flung John into a fury. " What earthly name can compel the free breath of a sacred king to submit to questioning ? Go, ask your master that ; and further add, from the mouth of England, that no Italian priest shall take tithe or toll in our dominions. But as, under God, we are supreme head, so under Him we will uphold that supremacy without the assistance of any Pope !"*

" Brother of England, you blaspheme," put in Philip, shocked by this defiance.

" Blaspheme, do I ? Though you and all the kings in Christendom are misled by this meddling priest — this man who sells divine pardon for money ; though you and all the rest feed this juggling witchcraft with your moneys ; yet I alone — alone, I say — will stand up against it and count the Pope's friends my foes."

This was enough. In the Pope's name Pandulph pro nounced the terrible words of interdict — placing John without the pale of Christianity, blessing all who revolted from allegiance to him, and promising the name and worship of a saint to any one who should by secret murder rob him of his hateful life. And the curses of Constance echoed the appalling sentences.

Then turning to Philip, Pandulph bade him, on peril of the Pope's curse, withdraw his friendship and join with the rest of Christendom against the heretic.

This demand, coming so soon upon his newly-knit com pact, placed Philip in a truly pitiable plight. And standing there amid the clamours of the women between the imperious

* Remember that Shakespeare, who puts this defiance into John's mouth, was writing for a Protestant England. Call it right or wrong, " England for England " was John's motto, and— black as Shakespeare must paint him— it is also the motto of this play.

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calm of Pandulph and dark face of John, who stood silent, waiting for his answer with the sneer ready on his lips, the King of France cut a sorry figure. In vain he protested and appealed to Pandulph. The legate answered him calmly, proving that to keep faith with John was to break faith with religion — that to be friends with both was impossible.

And in the end, as was certain from the first, Philip gave way. Though by doing so he must set discord between the young pair so newly married, he gave way. John had looked for nothing else. " France," said he, with curt contempt, " thou shalt rue this hour within this hour "; and turning to Faulconbridge, bade him draw the English forces together. Faulconbridge needed no second bidding.

And in the fight which followed, Faulconbridge, at least, had his revenge. It is not known in what part of the field he encountered Limoges, or what was said between them. But he returned nonchalantly bearing Limoges' head, and asserting that, by his life, it was very hot weather !

John, too, enjoyed some measure of revenge in taking prisoner young Arthur, whom he handed over into the keeping of his Chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh. In the camp of the beaten French there was little doubt now of the fate in store for the boy. His mother, Constance, cried for him, and refused to be comforted. Her body had become a grave to her soul, a prison holding the eternal spirit against its will. Her cries and calls upon death wrung the hearers' hearts. They deemed her mad wholly, but she denied it with fierceness. " I am not mad. If I were, I could forget my son, or cheat myself with a babe of rags. I am not mad." Binding up her dishevelled hair, she fell to wondering and asking Pandulph if 'twere true she should meet her boy in heaven. " For now sorrow will canker his beauty, and he will grow hollow as a ghost, and dim, and meagre ; and so he'll die. And so, when he rises again, and I meet him in the court of heaven, I shall not

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know him — shall never, never again behold my pretty Arthur !" Philip and Pandulph tried to rebuke this excess of grief. She pointed to the Legate, " He talks that never had a son!" Then turned to the King: "Grief! It is grief that fills up the room of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks at my side, puts on his pretty looks, and repeats his words. Good reason have I to be fond of grief. Fare you well ! Had you such a loss as 1,1 could give better comfort than yours." And she went her way to her chamber ; but as she went she broke out crying again, " O Lord ! my boy, my fair son, my Arthur !"

Lewis the Dauphin and Pandulph watched her as she went, the boy shallow of heart and head, the man deep- witted and just now thoughtful even beyond his habit. " Before the curing of a disease," he mused, half-aloud, " ay, in the instant when health turns back towards repair, the fit is strongest. It is strange, now, to think how much John has lost in this which he supposes so clearly won. You are grieved, are you not, that Arthur is prisoner ?"

"As heartily," said Lewis, "as John is glad."

" You are young. Listen ; John has seized Arthur, and while that lad lives John cannot draw a quiet breath. Arthur will fall."

" But what shall I gain by Arthur's fall ?"

" Simply this, that in the right of your bride, the Lady Blanch, you can then claim all that Arthur did. The times conspire with you. This murder of Arthur — which must be — will so freeze the hearts of men against John that every natural sign of heaven will be taken for an index of divine wrath against him."

" May be," Lewis urged, " he will not touch his life, but hold him a prisoner."

" Should you but move a foot," said the astute priest, " even if Arthur be not dead already, at that news he dies. That death will set the hearts of all England in revolt. Nor is this all. Faulconbridge is even now in England ransack-

6

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ing the church and offending charity. A dozen French over there at this moment would whistle ten thousand Englishmen to their side. Shall we lay this before your father ?"

The temptation was too strong. " Yes, let us go," answered Lewis. " Strong reasons make strong actions. What you urge my father will not deny."

On one point Pandulph was not mistaken. While Arthur lived John could not draw quiet breath. No sooner had he despatched Faulconbridge to England than he called Hubert de Burgh to him. Of murder he would not speak openly, but first he dwelt on Hubert's professed love for him, and went on to say that he had a matter to speak of, but must fit it to some better time. The day was too open. If it were night now, and a friend standing by — such a friend as could see without eyes, hear without ears, make reply with out tongue, why then . . . and yet he loved Hubert well and believed himself loved in return.

" So well," protested Hubert, " that were it death to do bidding of yours, I would undertake it !"

" Do I not know thou wouldst ? Hubert," he whispered, casting a glance over his shoulder at the boy, whom Elinor had craftily drawn aside. " Good Hubert, throw an eye on that boy yonder. I tell thee he is a serpent in my way. Wheresoever I tread he lies before me. Dost understand ? Thou art his keeper."

" And will keep him so that he shall never offend your Majesty."

" Death." John muttered the word, half to himself.

" My lord ?" Hubert heard, and half understood.

" A grave." John was not looking at him.

" He shall not live."

"Enough." John made show not to have heard. "Hubert, I love thee. Well, well, I'll not say what I intended. To England now, with a merry heart !"

ARTHUR PLEADING WITH HUBERT. (From a print in the Boydell collection after J. Northcote, R.A.)

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When Hubert, however, had his young charge safe in England, John's commands became more precise. Arthur's eyes were to be burnt out with hot irons — an order which revolted even one of the executioners hired for the task. And when the dreadful hour came, and Hubert had the men stationed behind the arras with orders to heat the irons, his heart, as he sent for the boy, sickened at the thought of the black business. For Arthur with his gentle and confiding nature had soon given Hubert his love, and Hubert's rough nature was touched by the child who meant no harm to any one and could not understand that any one should mean harm to him.

Arthur saw at once that his friend was heavy. " Why should you be sad ?" he asked. " I think nobody should be sad but I ; and if only I were out of prison, and a shepherd- boy, I could be as merry as the day was long. I would even be merry here, if it were not for fear of my uncle. Is it my fault, though, that I am Geoffrey's son ? I wish I were your son, Hubert, and then you would love me."

This innocent talk was torture to Hubert. He feared that more of it would steal all his resolution, and therefore pulled out the hateful paper at once and showed it, turning away to hide the tears that against his will came into his eyes.

" What !" cried the dazed child. " Burn out my eyes ! Will you do it ? Have you the heart ? Hubert, when your head ached, I bound it with my handkerchief — the best I had — and sat with you at midnight to comfort you. If you think this was crafty love, you must. But will you ndeed put out these eyes that never so much as frowned on you, and never shall ?"

" I must. I have sworn," groaned Hubert, and stamped his foot for signal to call the executioners. It was pitiful how Arthur ran and clung to him at the sight of them with their cords and irons.

" Save me, Hubert, save me !" he screamed.

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" Give me the iron, and bind him here," commanded Hubert.

" No, no — I will not struggle. I will be still as a stone. For Heaven's sake do not let them bind me ! Hubert, hear me ! — drive these men away, and I will sit as quiet as a lamb. I will not wince, will not speak a word. Only send these men away, and I will forgive whatever torment you put me to !"

" Go," said Hubert, " leave me with him." And the executioners withdrew, glad to be released from the horrible deed. " Come, boy, prepare yourself."

But Arthur pleaded on his knees. " Hubert, cut out my tongue, if you will, but spare my eyes ! O, spare my eyes !" The iron, while he pleaded, grew cold in Hubert's hand. He could not do this monstrous crime. It was ruin for him if John discovered the truth, but he would take the risk, and spread the report that Arthur was dead. Thus resolved, he led the boy away to hide him.

His friends in the French camp were not the only ones who foreboded evil for Arthur. To make all sure, John on his return to England had himself crowned a second time. The barons who attended — the Earls of Pembroke, Salis bury, and the rest — were full of courtly phrases. This second coronation, they assured John, was superfluous as to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, perfume the violet, or seek to garnish daylight with a taper. But behind these polite professions they were whispering about Arthur's fate. And when John bade them state what reforms they wished for, the Earl of Pembroke boldly requested, for all, that Arthur should be set at liberty.

" Let it be so," answered John, who knew, or thought he knew, how idle a thing he conceded. At this moment Hubert entered, and the King drew him aside, while the lords whispered their suspicions.

" Good lords," announced John, coming back, " I regret

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that to grant your demand is beyond me. This man tells me that Arthur died last night."

There was an ominous silence. Then the Earl of Salis bury spoke. " Indeed," said he with meaning, " we feared that his sickness was past cure." " Yes," added the Earl of Pembroke, " we heard how near his death he was — before he felt himself sick. This must be answered for."

" Why are you frowning on me ?" John demanded. "Do I hold the shears of destiny, or can I command life ?"

"It is foul play," said Salisbury boldly, and Pembroke echoed him. In stern anger the barons withdrew. Already John began to repent his cruel order, or at any rate the haste of it.

Soon he had further cause. News came that France was arming mightily to invade England — nay, had already landed an army under the Dauphin ; that his mother Elinor was dead ; that death, too, had ended the frenzy of poor Con stance. How could he meet the invaders ? His barons were disaffected. Faulconbridge, who had been levying cruel toll upon the clergy, returned with word that the whole country was uneasy, full of vague fears, overrun with men prophesying disasters. In truth the interdict lay on the land like a blight. All public worship of God had ceased. The church-doors were shut and their bells silent ; men celebrated no sacrament but that of private baptism ; youth and maid could not marry ; the dying went without pardon or comfort ; the dead lay unburied by the highroads ; the corpses of the clergy were piled on churchyard walls in leaden coffins ; the people heard no sermons but those preached at the market-crosses by priests who cried down curses, or wild prophets who uttered warnings and pointed to the signs of heaven for confirmation. With news similar to Faulconbridge's Hubert broke in on the King, as he sat muttering in dark sorrow for his mother Elinor's death. It was " Arthur," « Arthur," in all men's mouths. The peers

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had gone to seek Arthur's grave ; all the common folk whispered of Arthur's death.

" Arthur's death?" John interrupted him savagely. "Who murdered him but you ?"

" At your wish," retorted Hubert.

" It is the curse of kings to be attended by such over- hasty slaves."

" Here is your hand and seal for it," Hubert protested. But John, who by this time heartily wished Arthur alive again, broke out on him with craven reproaches. Why had Hubert taken him at his word? Why had he not dissuaded, even by a look — a look would have been enough." So he ran on, until Hubert had to confess the truth, that Arthur was yet alive.

" Arthur alive !" The King sprang up. " Hasten ! Re port it to the peers ! Forgive what I said in my passion ; my rage was blind. Nay, answer me not, but hasten and bring these angry lords back to me !"

But Hubert was mistaken. Arthur was no longer alive- The unhappy Prince, scheming to break from his prison, had escaped the watch by donning a ship-boy's clothes ; but in a rash leap from the walls had broken himsslf upon the stones below, a little while before the barons — Pembroke, Salisbury, and Bigot — arrived in search of him. Before hearing Hubert's news John had despatched Faulcon bridge to persuade them to return. He overtook them by the wall of the castle ; and while he urged them, they stumbled together on the young body lying at the base of it.

" It was murder," they swore ; " the worst and vilest of murder ; nay, a murder that stood alone, unmatchable !" They appealed to Faulconbridge.

" It is a damnable work," he admitted indignantly. " The deed of a heavy hand ; that is," he mused doubtfully, " if it be the work of any hand."

"///" cried Salisbury. "There is no *// We had an inkling of this. It is Hubert's shameful handiwork devised

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by the King — whose service, kneeling by this sweet child's body, I renounce, and swear neither to taste pleasure nor take rest until I have glorified this hand of mine with ven geance !" And the two other barons said AMEN to him.

But hardly was the vow taken before Hubert himself arrived, hot with haste, and panting, " Lords, the King sends for you. Arthur is alive !" With that he stood con founded, staring down upon Arthur's dead body.

" Begone, villain !" Salisbury drew his sword. " Mur derer !" " I am no villain, no murderer," Hubert protested. " Cut him to pieces !" urged Pembroke. Faulconbridge flung himself between them, threatening to strike Salisbury dead if he stirred a foot. " Put up your sword, or I'll so maul you and your toasting-iron that you'll think the devil himself has got hold of you !" And Salisbury, proud lord as he was, obeyed. But, though Hubert protested his innocence, the angry lords would not believe. Faulcon bridge could do no more, and was forced, to his chagrin, to watch them galloping off to join the Dauphin.

When they were gone he turned to Hubert. " Know you of this work ? For if this work be yours, Hubert, your soul is lost beyond reach of mercy ; nay, if you but con sented, despair. Hubert, I suspect you grievously."

Said Hubert : " If in act, or consent, or thought, I stole the sweet breath of this child, let hell lack pains enough for my torture ! I left him well." He lifted the body and carried it in his arms into the castle, while Faulconbridge followed sorely perplexed. " I lose my way," confessed that honest soldier, " amid the thorns and dangers of this world."

By this time John's case was a sorry one. Pope Innocent had formally deposed him, and was urging on the crusade which the Dauphin led against England. Wales was in revolt, Scotland intriguing against him. But, worse than all, England herself could not be relied on. Betrayed by his barons, who flocked to Lewis' standard ; denounced

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by the clergy ; sullenly hated by all classes, who laid the miseries of the interdict to his account ; the King felt the ground slipping from under his feet.

But he was an Angevin, after all ; that is to say, as diabolically clever as he was shameless. It only needed shamelessness, and by a bold stroke he could turn the tables on France, and perhaps win back all. John played it. He sent for Pandulph, and hypocritically tendered his submis sion to the Pope, on condition that the Pope called off the French and put a stop to the crusade against him. Like many a man without religion John was slavishly super stitious, and he had heard it prophesied that before Ascen sion Day he should deliver up his crown ; and it pleased him to think that by this form of tendering it into Pandulph's hands he was cheating Heaven as well as his enemies.

Pandulph gave him back the circlet, and hastened off to compel the Dauphin to lay down his arms. Scarcely had he left before Faulconbridge arrived with news that London had thrown open its gates to the French, and the barons refused to return to their allegiance.

" What ! When they heard that Arthur was yet alive ?"

" They found him dead— done to death by some accursed hand."

" That villain Hubert told me he lived."

"On my soul," said Faulconbridge, "he did, for aught Hubert knew."

John informed him of the peace just made with the Pope. As might be expected, this news filled Faulconbridge with disgust. It was too much altogether for his English stomach. " But perhaps," he suggested, " the Cardinal Pandulph cannot make your peace," — he had to call it "your peace " — " and, if he can, let them see at least that we meant to defend ourselves." And with John's permission he hurried off to save what he could of England's honour.

Indeed, Pandulph was not prospering on his errand. He found the Dauphin entertaining the revolted barons with

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words as fair as they were deceitful, since, after using them to crush John, he meant to make short work with Salisbury, Pembroke, and the rest. Young Lewis had learnt his lesson too well. As Pandulph himself had once suggested, he was now by Arthur's death left with a good claim to the English crown. In short, he flatly refused to draw off his troops. " Am I Rome's slave ?" he demanded. " Your breath kindled this war, but who maintained it ? Who but I pro vided men and munition, and bore the sweat of this busi ness ? Here I am with England half-conquered, and all the best cards in my hand, and you ask me to retire ! No, on my soul, I will not !"

In this temper Faulconbridge found him, with the legate at a complete loss. It was the chance he had prayed for, and he made royal use of it. In the name of England he stood up to the angry Dauphin, defied him, and dressed him down with threats. " Our English King promises through me to whip you and your army of youngsters out of his terri tories. What ! the hand that cudgelled you the other day at your own door till you jumped the hatch and hid yourself, and shook even when a cock crew — your own Gallic cock — thinking its voice an Englishman's — do you deem that hand which chastised you in your own chambers to be enfeebled here ?" And having done with the Dauphin, he swung round on the revolted barons and gave them their rating in turn.

" Enough !" broke in Lewis at length. " We grant you can outscold us." Pandulph would have put in a word, but Faulconbridge bore him down, and with mutual defiance the parley ended.

It was war now, but a war which brought disasters to both sides. In the south of England the Dauphin met with small resistance ; but the fleet 'which was to bring him sup plies came to wreck on the Goodwin Sands, and the English barons, warned of the treachery he plotted against them, streamed away from him. On the other hand, John, though

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he kept the field fiercely, traversing the midlands by forced marches from the Welsh border to Lincoln and breaking up the barons' plans, was already touched with a fever which increased on him as he started from Lynn and crossed the Wash in a fresh movement northwards. In crossing the sandy flats his troops were surprised by the tide, and all his baggage and treasure washed away.

Shaking with the fever, which by this time had taken fatal hold of him, wet, exhausted, and sick at heart, the stricken tyrant took shelter in the Abbey of Swineshead. There, men said, a monk poisoned his foodj but although the monks had reason enough to hate him, we need not lay this crime at their door. Panting for air, crying that his soul might have elbow-room for hell was within him, he was borne out into the abbey orchard. The tears of his young son Henry fell on his face. "The salt of them is hot," he complained ; and so, at the height of his own misery and England's, he died.

His death put a new face on the fortunes of England. Against a young king, supported by the barons and the better hopes of his subjects, the troops of a foreigner could not hold their ground for long on this island. And the lesson of this " troublesome raigne " is summed up for us in the wise, brave, and patriotic words of Faulconbridge — lines which every English boy should get by heart :

" This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, If England to herself do rest but true."

KING RICHARD THE SECOND

WHEN King Edward the Third died, the crown passed to his grandson Richard, son of the good and gallant Black Prince, whose untimely death all England lamented. And though Richard became King in his eleventh year, all England hoped much of him for his father's sake. In honour of his coronation London was gay with banners and arches, and the loyal merchants of Cheapside erected a fountain which ran with wine for the rejoicing citizens.

But the sons of strong men are not always strong, and as time went on Richard began to disappoint the hopes of his subjects. He was weak, partly no doubt by nature, partly perhaps by training • for he had too many advisers, some of whom flattered him whilst all were intent on their own ends. A boy may be weak and yet very wilful, and this boy- king naturally made favourites of those who flattered him most, and, being without experience, trusted to their advice. At first he was given twelve councillors ; his three uncles, the Duke of Lancaster (called John of Gaunt), the Duke of York, and the Duke of Gloucester, being excluded : but these three in their jealousy often interfered with the government, and at last one of them, the Duke of Gloucester, was put at the head of the council. Under him the Parliament — called "wonderful" by some, and " merciless " by others who admired it less — put to death two of Richard's favourites, De Vere and Suffolk, and stripped the rest of their properties. This incensed the young King, who waited his time, and at twenty-two, declaring he would be in leading-strings no

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longer, dismissed his guardians and for some years ruled his kingdom discreetly and well.

But he was not great enough to forgive those who had humbled him. Perhaps, too, he still feared the Duke of Gloucester. At any rate, after eight years of merciful rule he seized his uncle suddenly and had him carried off to Calais, where Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, was governor; and in the prison there Gloucester came to a mysterious end. We cannot be certain that he was murdered by the King's order ; but many believed this. And they believed it the more surely when Richard began to cast off pretence of ruling to please his people. He had chosen new favourites — Sir John Bushy, Sir Henry Green, Sir William Bagot — to replace his old ones ; and now he called a packed parliament, which not only undid the acts of the detested " wonderful " Parliament, but entrusted all future govern ment to the King and a little knot of his friends. So Richard for the time was absolute, and the kingdom suffered, as it always must when a King postpones its happiness to his private likes and dislikes.

Gloucester was dead, and of the other two uncles (what ever they suspected) old Lancaster — or John of Gaunt — was too wise, and old York too pliable, to accuse the King openly of his murder. But John of Gaunt had a son Henry, sur- named Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, a soldierly man, who was not so cautious. Henry's wife, too, was a sister of Gloucester's widow, and this no doubt made him more eager for revenge. Yet even Henry Bolingbroke did not dare accuse his cousin the King in so many words. He chose a more politic way. At first privately, and then openly, he charged Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk — who had been governor of Calais at the time of Gloucester's murder — as a traitor. The King summoned the appellant and the accused to con front each other in his presence, and there, after mutual defiance, the one protesting the truth of his charge, the other his complete innocence, and both their loyalty, they severally

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stated their quarrel. " I accuse Mowbray," said Boling- broke, "first, that he has detained for his own use eight thousand nobles which should have been paid to the King's soldiers ; next, that he has been the head and spring of all treasons contrived in this realm for these eighteen years; and further," — and here lay the pith of his accusation — " that he did contrive the death of the Duke of Gloucester, whose innocent blood cries to me from the earth for justice and chastisement." "What sayest thou to this?" demanded Richard, hiding his feelings (whatever they were) and turn ing to Mowbray. " Fear not because the accuser is my cousin. Ye are equally my subjects, and the King's eyes and ears are impartial, the firmness of his soul unstooping." Mowbray gave Bolingbroke the lie in his throat. Each of the disputants by this time had thrown down his gage, and now each swore to uphold his cause upon the other's body. Richard endeavoured to appease them, and invoked the help of old John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke's father, who stood by. But Mowbray flung himself at the King's feet imploring to be allowed to defend his honour ; and finding Bolingbroke equally stubborn, Richard ceased his mediation. " We were not born," he said, " to sue, but to command. And since our commandment will not make you friends, we charge you to appear at Coventry, on St. Lambert's day, and there decide your quarrel with sword and lance."

So at Coventry on the appointed day the lists were set with all the ceremony and circumstance of those times. The King attended with his train of nobles and favourites ; and as they entered to the sound of trumpets and filed into their seats along the decorated balcony, they found both combatants armed and ready with their heralds. At a wcrd from the King the Lord Marshal, to whom fell the solemn business of dressing the lists, approached Mowbray the defendant, and demanded his name and quarrel.

" My name," was the answer, " is Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, and I come hither upon my knightly oath,

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to defend my loyalty and truth to God, my King, and my heirs, against the Duke of Hereford who appeals me ; and by the grace of God and this arm of mine to prove him a traitor to my God, my King, and me. And as I truly fight, defend me Heaven !"

Bolingbroke, on being asked the same question, declared, " I am Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby, who stand in arms here ready to prove in lists upon Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, by God's grace and my bodily valour, that he is a traitor to God, to King Richard, and to me. And as I truly fight, defend me Heaven !"

The Lord Marshal thereupon (as the custom was) gave warning that no man should, upon pain of death, enter or touch the lists, except only the officers appointed to direct the duel. But before engaging Bolingbroke craved leave to kneel and kiss the King's hand ; "for," said he, " Mowbray and I are like two men vowed to a long and weary pilgrim age, and it were fitting that we took a ceremonious and loving farewell of our friends." "Nay," said the King, when this message was reported ; " we will ourselves descend and embrace him ;" and he did so, saying, " Cousin of Hereford, as thy cause is right, so be thy fortune !" mean ing " as far as," or "if thy cause is right," for he well knew that the charge against Mowbray was covertly aimed at himself. And he added, " Though thy blood and mine be kin, if thy blood be shed we may lament but not avenge thee." " Nay," answered Bolingbroke, who took his mean ing, " let no man lament for me if I fall. But I go to this fight, and so I take my leave, confident, lusty, young, and cheerful. And do thou, my father," turning to John of Gaunt, " prosper me with thy blessing, that my armour may be proof against my adversary, and thy name take new brightness from thy son's lance." " God make thee pros perous in thy good cause !" answered the old man.

The King's farewell to Mowbray was purposely more cold and brief. " However God or fortune may cast my

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lot," Mowbray protested, " there lives or dies a true subject, a loyal, just, and upright gentleman. Take from me the wish of happy years. And so, as a captive from prison, gentle and jocund, I go to this feast of battle. For truth has a quiet breast." "Farewell, my lord," the King an swered ; " in thine eye I read virtue and valour together."

With that he gave the word to the Lord Marshal. The two combatants received their lances, and the heralds on either side made proclamation : " Here standeth Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby, on pain to be found false and recreant, to prove the Duke of Norfolk a traitor to God, to his sovereign, and to him." " Here standeth Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, on pain to be found false and recreant, both to defend himself and to approve the same on Henry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby."

" Sound trumpets ! and set forward, combatants !" shouted the Lord Marshal ; but as the pair couched lances and dug spurs for the charge, as the horses gathered pace for the shock, he glanced towards the royal balcony, and held up a hand.

" Stay !" he cried. " The King has thrown down his truncheon !"

For by this signal Richard, as president of the fight, arrested it.

The combatants reined up. " Let them," commanded Richard, " lay by their helmets and spears and both return here to their chairs." And while they obeyed, and the trumpets sounded a long flourish, he consulted, or seemed to consult, with his nobles.

" Draw near," he commanded again, "and hearken what with our council we have decided." And he went on to unfold his sentence — a sentence of banishment on both ; for Bolingbroke ten years, but for Mowbray no date at all. " Never to return," were the hopeless words of Mowbray's sentence. " It is a heavy one," pleaded the unhappy man. " A dearer merit, and not so deep a maim, I have deserved

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at my King's hands. Can I unlearn my native English which I have learned these forty years ? I am too old to go to school now. That to which you condemn me is a living death."

But the King answered curtly that the time had gone by for pleading. Yet, weak man that he was, he recalled Mowbray and desired both him and Bolingbroke to lay hands on his sword and vow never to meet and plot against him — a foolish vow, which suggested a fear, and the keep ing of which he could never enforce.

Both took the vow. And on rising Bolingbroke made a last appeal to Mowbray to confess. But " No," said Mow- bray, " I am no traitor. What thou art, God, thou, and I know ; and all too soon, I fear, the King will learn and rue it." And so he departed into exile.

No sooner was he gone than weak Richard, reading the sorrow in the dimmed eyes of old John of Gaunt, impetu ously relieved Bolingbroke of four years of his sentence. His banishment, he promised, should be for six not for ten winters. But this wayward leniency brought him little gratitude. Bolingbroke did not even thank him. " Four lagging winters," he commented grimly, " four wanton springs ended in a word ! Such is the breath of kings !" Old Gaunt was more nobly rebukeful. " I thank my liege that for my sake he remits four years of my son's exile ; though it will profit me little, since, ere the six years be gone, my inch of taper will be burnt out, and I gone into darkness where I shall never see my son." " Why, uncle," Richard would have reassured him, " thou hast many years yet." The old man turned on him grandly. " But not a minute, King, that thou canst give ! Shorten my days with sorrow thou canst, kill me thou canst, but lengthen life or restore it thou canst not." " Thy son," said Richard, nettled to an unworthy taunt, " is banished upon good advice — which thy tongue joined in giving." " That is true," answered John of Gaunt ; " I gave it as a judge, not

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as a father, and in the sentence destroyed my own life. Alas ! I looked for one of you to say I was too strict with my own. But you did not ; you allowed my unwilling tongue to do myself this wrong !" To this the selfish Richard could find no answer, but curtly left them to their leave-taking. And a sorry leave-taking it was, the good old man vainly casting about for arguments to cheat the bitter ness of his son's exile. " Six winters are quickly gone . . . this absence will make home-coming all the more precious ... to the wise man all places visited by the eye of Heaven are ports and happy havens ... let necessity teach thee to reason thus, for there is no virtue like necessity." But the younger man brushed these flimsy consolations aside. " Can a man bear to hold fire in his hand by thinking of the frosty Caucasus, or cloy his hunger by imagining that he feasts ? No ; to apprehend happiness makes him feel more keenly the evil he suffers. But farewell England's ground — my mother and nurse ! Where'er I wander, this I can yet boast, that though banished I am a true-born Englishman." And with this he took his leave.

But Richard, alone with his favourites — Bagot and Green and the rest — could confess he was glad to be rid of Henry Bolingbroke. For the King had no sons of his own, and this son of Lancaster had wrooed the common people and practised such affability that to jealous minds he seemed to look forward with confidence to a day when the crown would be his. "Well, he is gone," said Green; "out of sight is out of mind." Thus relieved of present anxiety, and having no child for whom his love might have taught him that in the end a king's welfare and his people's are one, and having emptied his coffers by selfish extravagance, Richard fell in with a proposal to farm out the nation's revenues to these harpies, who undertook to provide him with ready money to suppress a rebellion in Ireland which for the moment was giving him trouble One day, while they were discussing this, Bushy entered with the news that

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John of Gaunt had been seized with a grievous illness. In such company Richard could blurt out his feelings. " Now, may God," he cried, " put it in the physician's mind to help him to his grave immediately ! ' The lining of his coffers shall make coats for our soldiers in these Irish wars. Pray God," he added cruelly, " that we may make haste — and come too late !" And all said " Amen."

John of Gaunt was sick indeed. His son's banishment had been his death-blow; and now, at Ely House in Holborn, he lay in his bed and discussed with his pliable brother, old York, the last warning he intended to deliver to Richard. "Vex not yourself; counsel comes in vain to him," urged York. " But the tongues of dying men — these, they say, enforce attention like deep harmony. Men's ends are more marked than their lives. Though Richard would not hear my counsel in life, his ear may be unsealed now." " No," said York, " for it is stopped with flattery. Save the little breath thou hast remaining." But the dying man felt bound to speak ; " for," said he, " I feel like a prophet inspired to foretell that this rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last;" and as he lay awaiting the King's coming, his lips began to mutter, over and over, words of love for England and pride in her.*

* This incomparable lament may only be rendered in Shakespeare's own words, which no English boy, who is old enough to love his country, is too young to get by heart, forgetting the sorrow in it. Tears such as Gaunt's are drawn from a well of joy and pride in England and of fierce love of her good name—

" This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

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While he mourned, the King was announced, with his Queen and train of courtiers. " How fares our noble uncle, Lancaster?" were the Queen's words; but Richard addressed York more roughly. " What comfort, man ? How is't with old Gaunt." The sick man heard the word, and his failing mind fixed and began to harp on it : " Ay, old Gaunt — old and gaunt — gaunt with keeping watch for sleeping England — gaunt as the grave to which I go." "Can sick and dying men be so witty ?" sneered Richard. " Nay, King, 'tis thou who art sick, and thy death-bed no lesser than thy realm wherein thou liest and givest over thy anointed body to be cured by these flatterers, these physicians who dealt the wound." And rising on his pillow he began to call shame on his nephew's mad misgovern- ment. But Richard, white for the moment and scared, turned upon him in a fury. "Thou lunatic, lean-witted fool ! Darest thou presume on an ague's privilege to admonish me thus ? Now, by my throne, wert thou not brother to great Edward's son, thy tongue which runs so roundly should run thy head from thy shoulders !" " Spare me not for that" exclaimed Gaunt bitterly : " my brother Gloucester's end is good witness that thou regardest not

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,— This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm : England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds : That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, How happy then were my ensuing death ! ' '

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shedding Edward's thy grandfather's blood !" And so having uttered at last the accusation which he had so long foreborne to utter, and for hinting at which he had consented to see his son exiled, Gaunt was borne out dying. " So be it," said Richard.

But so incensed was he — men of his nature being angriest when some fear underlies their wrath — that presently, when the Earl of Northumberland brought news that Gaunt's life had indeed flickered out, he rapped forth the order which he had discussed secretly with Bushy, Bagot, and the rest — to seize upon the dead duke's estate and moneys for his own royal use.

Even old York — weak worm as he was — turned at this. The nation's disgrace had not stirred him as it stirred Gaunt, but he could feel a family wrong ; and for once he plucked up courage to speak out — so boldly, indeed, as to astonish Richard. " Why, uncle, what's the matter ?" exclaimed the King incredulously, after a while. Even so small an interruption as this dashed the old man's spirit ; but he persisted— only now with some abatement of vigour — in warning the King what danger he courted by con fiscating Gaunt's property and thus dispossessing Boling- broke. Richard quickly took the measure of this protest. " Think what you will, we seize his plate, goods, money, and lands.' " Then I'll not be by to countenance it," was York's feeble conclusion, and with that he departed, mutter ing that no good could come of it.

He was scarcely gone before Richard betrayed how a little firmness might have carried the day. Almost in the same breath with which he gave instructions about con fiscating Lancaster's property, he appointed York to be lord governor of England during his own absence at the Irish wars. For in truth he had been brought up in a wholesome dread of his uncles, and some of it still lingered to be transferred to this last surviving one, and the weakest of them all.

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But if York scarcely knew his own mind, other nobles knew theirs. The Earl of Northumberland, head of the great house of Percy, only waited the King's departure to call shame on his conduct, or, as he preferred to put it (and men, when they meant business, have put it thus more than once or twice in English history), on the conduct of his misleading flatterers. He said enough, indeed, to make certain nobles present suspect that he had more to tell, and they pressed him to tell it — which he did. News had come from Brittany that Bolingbroke with a few noble followers and three thousand men-at-arms had set sail in eight tall ships with intent to make a landing in the north-east of England. They had been waiting only for the King's departure. " Then to horse !" cried Lord Ross ; and " To horse !" echoed Lord Willoughby ; and soon the con spirators were in saddle and galloping northwards.

It was true ; Bolingbroke had landed at Ravenspurgh on the Humber. There the Earl of Northumberland joined him, with other discontented nobles ; and no sooner was Northumberland proclaimed traitor than his brother, the Earl of Worcester, Lord Steward, broke his white staff of office and fled northwards to join the rising. The news reached the Queen as she sat talking with Bushy and Bagot. Her heart was heavy already after parting from her husband — for she loved him, poor lady ! — and heavier yet with an unborn sorrow ; for trouble often makes itself felt before it takes shape. And when Green came running with the ominous news, it sank like lead. Nor could she take comfort at the sight of trembling old York, who followed on Green's heels. " Uncle," she cried, " for God's sake speak comfortable words!" But York, though he had donned his gorget as if for war, could only wring his hands and cry feebly that he was old, and " Why am I, so weak that I can scarce support myself, left to underprop my nephew's kingdom ? Would to God he had cut my head off first ! Have no posts been despatched for Ireland ? How

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are we to find money ? Sure I cannot tell what to do in this tangle ... on one side the King, my kinsman, whom oath and duty bid me defend ; on the other, Bolingbroke, my kinsman too, whom the King has wronged. . . . Well, something must be done ! Gentlemen, muster your forces and meet me at Berkeley. I ought to be at Flashy where my brother Gloucester's wife is lying dead at this moment. But there's no time ; everything is at sixes and sevens !"

Clearly there was little to be hoped of so rambling a commander ; and no sooner had he departed than Bushy, Bagot, and Green resolved to save themselves by flight. Green and Bushy posted off for Bristol ; Bagot to take advantage of the fair wind for Ireland — the wind which at once hastened the ill news towards the King and hindered his own return.

There was good cause for their dejection and terror. Escorted by Northumberland and his forces, Bolingbroke marched unimpeded down and across England from Ravens- purgh to Berkeley in Gloucestershire. Here with some show of boldness old York challenged his advance, and in an interview which he opened with great dignity upbraided his nephew roundly with this bold act of treason. Henry, whose action spoke for itself, was humble enough in words. " My gracious uncle, in what have I offended ? I am Lancaster now ; but my rights and revenues have — your self knows how unjustly — been plucked from me and given away to unthrifty upstarts. I ask for my legal rights only ; but lawyers are denied me, and therefore I am come to lay my claim in person." Behind all this, and behind the pleas urged on York by the other disaffected lords, stood the real argument which all were too polite to hint at — Bolingbroke's troops. York hemm'd and ha'd. " Well, I can't prevent you ; but if I could I call Heaven to witness that I would. Since I cannot, I call you to witness that I am neutral. So fare you well — unless it please you to enter the castle here and repose you for the night." " An offer," answered

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Bolingbroke smoothly, " which we will accept. But we must persuade you a little further — and that is, to go with us to Bristol Castle, where I hear that Bushy, Bagot, and the rest of these caterpillars of the commonwealth have sought shelter." " May be, may be," answered old York, who knew himself in no condition to refuse. " Things past redress are past care," was now the one reflection in which he could find any comfort.

There remained a last hope for Richard in the Welsh army, forty thousand strong, which the Earl of Salisbury had collected in Wales. But already this strong force was weakening. A report ran among them that the King was dead ; and in their superstitious minds this was confirmed by a dozen idle omens. A blight had fastened on all the bay-trees in the country, the heaven was full of meteors, the moon had taken a bloody tinge, and prophets whispered that such signs infallibly foreran the death ot kings or their fall. One thing was certain : the King delayed to return. And before he landed on the Welsh coast, this army, which might have saved him, had melted away.

But as yet Richard knew nothing of the extent of these disasters. On his landing he wept for joy and touched the very earth affectionately, comparing himself to a mother who re-greets her child after a long absence and plays fondly with her tears and smiles at meeting. And in truth this was Richard's way ; whether glad or sorry, he must play with his feelings and dress them up in fine words, and dandle and make a show of them. " Nay, do not mock me, my lords," said he (for they could not always conceal their impatience of this pretty habit) ; " this earth shall have a feeling and these stones turn to armed soldiers sooner than see her native King falter under foul rebellion." " No doubt, no doubt," answered in effect the trusty Bishop of Carlisle; "but none the less we had better be using all the means which Heaven puts in our way." And old York's son, the

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Duke of Aumerle, hinted even more roughly that this was no time for dallying. Richard turned on him petulantly : " Discomfortable cousin ! knowest thou not that thieves and robbers range abroad boldly in darkness ; but when the sun confronts them and plucks the cloak of night off their backs, they stand bare and naked and tremble at themselves ! So, when I confront him, shall this traitor Bolingbroke tremble at himself and his sins. Not all the water in the rough rude sea has power to wash the balm from an anointed King, nor can the breath of worldlings depose the Lord's elected deputy. For every man impressed to aid Bolingbroke, God hath in his pay a glorious angel to fight for Richard !"

The entrance of the Earl of Salisbury interrupted these big words. " Ah, my lord, welcome !" Richard greeted him. " How far off lies your power ?" meaning the Welsh army. " Alas," was the desperate answer, " no nearer and no farther off thaji this my weak arm. My gracious lord, you have come one day too late. Call back yesterday and you shall have twelve thousand fighting men. But to-day that army is gone. It heard that the King was dead, and has fled to make friends with Bolingbroke."

At this ominous news the blood left Richard's cheeks ; but at a word from Aumerle he recovered himself. " Am I not King ? Is not the King's name twen,ty thousand men ? Arm then, my name, against this puny subject ! Have I not York, too ? And has not York power enough to serve my turn ?"

But his high tone sank again as he caught sight of a new messenger, Sir Stephen Scroop, with ill-tidings written on his face ; and (as men will) he tried to meet the blow he saw coming, and to soften it by talking humbly. "At the worst it will be worldly loss. Suppose my kingdom lost. Why, then, my care goes with it. Will Bolingbroke be great as we ? He shall not be greater ; for if he serve God, we'll serve Him too."

Poor flimsy arguments — and not even honest ones — to

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fortify a king's mind ! For Scroop's tale was of disaster. " Bolingbroke covers the land with steel, and hearts harder than steel. Not strong men only, but greybeards, boys, thy very almsmen, yea, even women, are running to him." " What— what of my friends, the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, and Green ? Have they made peace with Bolingbroke ?" "They have made peace"— began Scroop. "O villains, vipers!" broke in the King, and fell to cursing them for dogs and Judases. As he took breath, Scroop explained that the peace these unhappy men had made was not this world's peace. Bolingbroke had taken them prisoners at Bristol, and already the grave covered them. "But where," asked Aumerle, " is my father, the Duke of York, with his power ?" " No matter where," cried despondent Richard, and began again to play with his misery. " Let us talk of graves, worms, epitaphs — nothing but sorrow. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, and of Death, the King of kings !" and so forth. " My lord," said the Bishop of Carlisle impatiently, " wise men never sit and wail their woes, but seek to meet and prevent them ;" and " Yes," said Aumerle once more, "ask of my father York; he has a force to help you." Richard, as easily elated as cast down, caught at the sug gestion he had rejected a minute before. He was not only hopeful again, but confident. "Thou chidest me well; to win our own is an easy task. Say " — he turned on Scroop — " where is our uncle York with his power ? Speak sweetly, man, though thou lookest sourly!" "Alas!" said the mes senger, " I look as I feel, and my tale is like a torture applied little by little. Your uncle York has joined Boling broke ; your northern castles have fallen to him, and your southern gentlemen-in-arms have gone over to his side." Under this last blow of all Richard weakly faced around on Aumerle. " Beshrew thee, cousin, for leading me to comfort when I was so sweetly on the way to despair ! By heaven, I'll hate him for ever who speaks another word of comfort !

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Discharge my followers ! Let them hence from me to Bolingbroke !"

In this spirit the unhappy King set forth on his way to Flint Castle, where he was scarcely installed before Boling broke arrived with drums and colours and a force which included the willing Northumberland and the unwilling York. It was Harry Percy (or Hotspur, as men called him for his brave and heady temper), Northumberland's son, who brought the news that King Richard lay within the castle. Bolingbroke at once ordered a parley. His trumpet sounded and was answered, and presently Richard himself appeared on the walls, with the Bishop of Carlisle, Aumerle, Salisbury, Scroop, and the rest of his followers.

Bolingbroke did not himself advance to the parley, but remained below the walls -and withdrawing a little apart sent Northumberland forward to be his spokesman. As this rough noble advanced, unceremoniously enough, the King drew himself up and his eye (as even the watchers below could see) flashed like an eagle's. There was a pause, and " We are waiting, my lord," said Richard ; " you forget, it seems, the duty of kneeling to your lawful King. If we be not that, show us, pray, the hand of God that hath dis missed us from our stewardship. Go, tell Bolingbroke — who methinks stands yonder — that every stride he makes upon my land is dangerous treason. He is come to open war as it were a testament bequeathing him a crown ; but before he enjoys that crown in peace, ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons shall change the complexion of England to scarlet indignation."

To this Northumberland gave a smooth answer. "'Heaven forbid our lord the King should so be assailed ! Nay, Bolingbroke begs leave rather to kiss thy hand and swear that he comes only to sue for his revenues and his restora tion as a free subject. This granted, he swears to lay aside his arms ; and, as I am a gentleman, I believe him."

" Then tell him," said Richard, " that he is welcome, and

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his demands shall be granted," — a galling answer for a monarch to utter, yet a wise one ; for, as Aumerle said, " We must fight with gentle words till time lend us friends and sharper weapons."

And it was an answer which yet gave Richard a chance, had he kept a cool head. For by holding Bolingbroke to his oath he could have forced him to choose between dis banding his army and seizing the King by force, and so pro claiming himself a breaker of his word. But the sight of Northumberland returning so agitated him that he let slip the very offer which Bolingbroke dearly wished to receive, but hardly yet dared to demand. " Must the King submit ?" he cried. "The King shall do it. Must he be deposed and lose the name of King ? Why, then, let it go !" And turn ing to Aumerle, who could not withhold his tears (for many men yet loved Richard in spite of his waywardness), he confessed most pitifully and in words that might have moved a stone that his spirit was broken. " Let me now change my jewels for a set of beads, my palace for a hermitage, my gay apparel and my sceptre for an almsman's gown and such a staff as palmers carry, my large kingdom for a little grave — a little grave and