Runs in your veins; and my thrice-puissant liege

Is in the very May-morn of his youth,

Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.

120

Exe. Your brother kings and monarchs of the earth

Do all expect that you should rouse yourself,
As did the former lions of your blood.

West. They know your grace hath cause and means and might;

So hath your highness; never king of England
Had nobles richer and more loyal subjects,

Whose hearts have left their bodies here in Eng-
land

And lie pavilion'd in the fields of France. Cant. O, let their bodies follow, my dear liege, 130

125. "Your grace hath cause and means." Hanmer reads "Your race hath had cause, means.” Various readings have been suggested, but there seems to be no difficulty whatever in understanding the text as it stands.-I. G.

125, 126. Coleridge thinks that perhaps these lines should be recited dramatically thus:

"They know your grace hath cause, and means, and might:
So hath your highness,-never king of England
Had nobles richer, and more loyal subjects";

which infers an ellipsis very much in Shakespeare's manner. Of course the sense expressed in full would give a reading something thus: "So hath your highness rich nobles and loyal subjects; no king of England ever had any that were more so."-H. N. H.

130-135. So in Holinshed's paraphrase of the archbishop's speech: "At length, having said sufficientlie for the proofe of the king's just and lawful title to the crowne of France, he exhorted him to advance foorth his banner to fight for his right, to spare neither bloud, sword, nor fire, sith his warre was just, his cause good, and his claime true: and he declared that in their spirituall convocation they had granted to his highnesse such a summe of monie, as never by no spirituall persons was to any prince before those daies given or advanced."-H. N. H.

With blood and sword and fire to win your

right;

In aid whereof we of the spiritualty

Will raise your highness such a mighty sum
As never did the clergy at one time

Bring in to any of your ancestors.

K. Hen. We must not only arm to invade the French,

But lay down our proportions to defend

Against the Scot, who will make road upon us
With all advantages.

Cant. They of those marches, gracious sovereign,
Shall be a wall sufficient to defend

141

Our inland from the pilfering borderers. K. Hen. We do not mean the coursing snatchers only,

But fear the main intendment of the Scot,
Who hath been still a giddy neighbor to us;
For you shall read that my great-grandfather
Never went with his forces into France,
But that the Scot on his unfurnish'd kingdom
Came pouring, like the tide into a breach,
With ample and brim fulness of his force, 150

131. "blood"; so Ff. 3, 4; F. 1, "Bloods"; F. 2, "Blouds.”—I. G. 140-142. The marches are the borders. The quartos have this speech thus:

"The marches, gracious sovereign, shall be sufficient

To guard your England from the pilfering borderers"; where, as Mr. Collier suggests, the putting of England for inland, which latter the sense plainly requires, would seem to argue rather a mishearing of the lines as spoken, than a misreading of the manuscript.-H. N. H.

150. "with ample and brim fulness"; probably "brim" is here adjectival; Pope reads "brimfulness" but the accent favors the present reading.-I. G.

Galling the gleaned land with hot assays,
Girding with grievous siege castles and towns;
That England, being empty of defense,

Hath shook and trembled at the ill neighbor-
hood.

Cant. She hath been then more fear'd than harm'd, my liege;

For hear her but exampled by herself;

When all her chivalry hath been in France,
And she a mourning widow of her nobles,
She hath herself not only well defended,
But taken and impounded as a stray

160

The King of Scots; whom she did send to
France,

To fill King Edward's fame with prisoner
kings,

And make her chronicle as rich with praise,

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea

With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries. West. But there's a saying very old and true, If that you will France win,

Then with Scotland first begin:'

154. "the ill-neighborhood"; Boswell, from Qq., reads "the bruit thereof."-I. G.

161. "the King of Scots"; King David, taken at Neville's Cross, 1346.-C. H. H.

162. "prisoner kings"; King John of France was likewise taken.C. H. H.

163. "her chronicle"; Capell, Johnson conj.; Ff. read, "their C."; Qq., "your Chronicles"; Rowe, "his Chronicle."—I. G.

As Knight remarks, in old manuscripts your and their were written alike.-H. N. H.

166. "Westmoreland"; in Ff. the following speech is given to Exeter, in Qq. to "a lord." In Holinshed the corresponding speech is spoken by Westmoreland; hence Capell restored his name here.С. Н. Н.

170

For once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,

To tear and havoc more than she can eat. Exe. It follows then the cat must stay at home: Yet that is but a crush'd necessity,

Since we have locks to safeguard necessaries,
And pretty traps to catch the petty thieves,
While that the armed hand doth fight abroad,
The advised head defends itself at home;
For government, though high and low and
lower,

Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,
Congreeing in a full and natural close,

Like music.

180

173. "tear"; so Rowe, ed. 2; Ff., "tame"; Qq. "spoil"; Theobald, "taint."-I. G.

The quartos read, "To spoil and havoc"; the folio,-"To tame and havoc"; neither of which agrees very well with the sense. We concur, therefore, with Collier and Verplanck, that tame was a misprint for teare, as the word was then spelled.-The matter is thus related by Holinshed: "When the archbishop had ended his prepared tale, Rafe Nevill earle of Westmerland, and as then lord Warden of the marches against Scotland, thought good to moove the king to begin first with Scotland, concluding the summe of his tale with this old saieng: Who so will France win, must with Scotland first begin."-H. N. H.

175. "crush'd necessity"; so in the folio: in the quartos "curs'd necessity"; which latter is commonly preferred in modern editions, though divers third readings have been proposed, to get rid of the alleged difficulty of the passage. We agree with Singer, Knight, and Verplanck, that there is little real difficulty in crush'd. Exeter's meaning apparently is,-"The necessity which you urge is overcome, done away, crushed, by the argument that we have locks and pretty traps for security against the weasel; so that it does not follow that the cat must stay at home."-H. N. H.

180-183. Theobald first compared these lines with Cicero, De

Cant.

Therefore doth heaven divid
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavor in continual motion;
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,
Obedience: for so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home,
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring
home

To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,

190

Republica, ii. 42, and thought that Shakespeare had perhaps borrowed from Cicero.-I. G.

The profound and beautiful idea of this passage occurs in a fragment quoted by St. Augustine from a lost book of Cicero's. But Shakespeare, if he did not discover it with his own unassisted eye, was more likely to derive it from Plato, who was much studied in England in his time. In the fourth book of his Republic he speaks something thus: "It is not wisdom and strength alone that make a state wise and strong; but order, like the harmony called the diapason, runs through the whole state, making the weakest, and the strongest, and the middling people move in one concent." And again: "The harmonic power of political justice is the same as that musical concent which connects the three chords, the octave, the bass, and the fifth."-H. N. H.

187–203. Lyly, in his Euphues (Arber's Reprint, pp. 262-4), has a similar description of the common-wealth of the bees: its ultimate source is probably Pliny's Natural History, Book xi. (n. b., Holland's translation did not appear till 1601).—I. G.

197. "majesty"; so Rowe from Qq.; Ff., "Maiesties.”—I. G.