Aum. Where is the duke my father with his power?

K. Rich. No matter where. Of comfort no man speak;

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

145

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors, and talk of wills:
And yet not so,-for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For Heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings :—
How some have been deposed, some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives; some sleeping killed;
All murdered: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

150

155

160

To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,-
As if this flesh which walls about our lives

165

Were brass impregnable; and, humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle walls, and farewell king!

170

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence; throw away respect,

Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while :

I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,

175

Need friends :-subjected thus,

How can you say to me—I am a king?................

Aum. My father hath a power; inquire of him,

And learn to make a body of a limb.

K. Rich. Thou chid'st me well-proud Bolingbroke, I come
To change blows with thee for our day of doom.
This ague-fit of fear is overblown;

An easy task it is to win our own....

190

Scroop. Your uncle York hath joined with Bolingbroke...

NOTES.-143. Duke, the Duke of York. 162. Antic sits a supposed reference to an old woodcut representing a king crowned and seated on his throne, and Death ensconced within the crown. 166. Self and vain conceit, selfconceit and vain conceit; so in Macbeth, v. 8, "By self and violent hands took off her life.' 168. Humored. This takes up and carries forward the description in 163, "Scoffing his state," etc.

Beshrew thee, cousin, which leadest me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!
What say you now?

205

What comfort have we now?

By Heaven, I'll hate him everlastingly
That bids me be of comfort any more.

ACT III., SCENE 4.-Langley. The Duke of York's Garden.

Enter the QUEEN and two Ladies.

Queen. But stay, here come the gardeners :
Let's step into the shadow of these trees......

Enter a Gardener and two Servants.

Gard. Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight:
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.—
Go thou, and, like an executioner,

Cut off the heads of too fast-growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth:
All must be even in our government.
You thus employed, I will go root away
The noisome weeds, that without profit suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.

1 Serv. Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined,
Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?

Gard.

Hold thy peace :

He that hath suffered this disordered spring
Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf:

The weeds that his broad-spreading leaves did shelter, 50
That seemed in eating him to hold him up,

Are plucked up, root and all, by Bolingbroke;
I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green.
1 Serv. What, are they dead?
Gard.

They are; and Bolingbroke

NOTES.-204. Beshrew, from shrewen, to curse-addressed to the Duke of Aumerle; which, originally of all genders, and still so in questions. 29. Apricocks. This early form came to us from the Portuguese albricoque; the later form apricot from the French abricot.

Hath seized the wasteful king. Oh, what pity is it,
That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud with sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear, and he to taste,
Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste and idle hours hath quite thrown down.

55

60

65

1 Serv. What, think you then the king shall be deposed?
Gard. Depressed he is already, and deposed

'Tis doubt he will be: letters came last night
To a dear friend of the good Duke of York's,
That tell black tidings.

70

See here the skill and judgment of our poet in giving reality and individual life, by the introduction of accidents in his historic plays, and thereby making them dramas and not histories. How beautiful an islet of repose a melancholy repose, indeed— is this scene with the gardener and his servant! and how truly affecting and realizing is the incident of the very horse Barbary in the scene with the groom in the last act!

(Scene 5.)

Groom. I was a poor groom of thy stable, king,
When thou wert king; who, travelling towards York,
With much ado at length have gotten leave
To look upon my sometimes royal master's face.

Oh, how it yearned my heart, when I beheld
In London streets, that coronation day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary,―
That horse that thou so often hast bestrid,
That horse that I so carefully have dressed!
K. Rich.
Rode he on Barbary?

75

80

I would once more remark upon the exalted idea of the only true loyalty developed in this noble and impressive play. We have neither the rants of Beaumont and Fletcher nor the sneers of Massinger. The vast importance of the personal character of the sovereign is distinctly enounced, whilst, at the same time, the genuine sanctity which surrounds him is attributed to, and grounded on, the position in which he stands as the convergence and exponent of the life and power of the state.

Lectures on Shakspeare.

[These lines were written late one evening in September 1804, after passing Deadman's Isle (Magdalen Islands). Moir (Delta) regards this poem and the Canadian boat-song as among the best of Moore's earlier poems, and as unsurpassed by any of his later efforts.]

See beneath yon
you,

cloud so dark,

Fast gliding along a gloomy bark?

Her sails are full, though the wind is still,

And there blows not a breath her sails to fill!

Say what doth that vessel of darkness bear?
The silent calm of the grave is there,
Save now and again a death-knell rung,
And the flap of the sails with night-fog hung.

There lieth a wreck on the dismal shore
Of cold and pitiless Labrador;

Where, under the moon, upon mounts of frost,
Full many a mariner's bones are tost.

Yon shadowy bark hath been to that wreck,
And the dim blue fire, that lights her deck,
Doth play on as pale and livid a crew
As ever yet drank the churchyard dew.

To Deadman's Isle, in the eye of the blast,
To Deadman's Isle, she speeds her fast;
By skeleton shapes her sails are furled,

And the hand that steers is not of this world!

Oh! hurry thee on-oh! hurry thee on,
Thou terrible bark, ere the night be gone,
Nor let morning look on so foul a sight
As would blanch for ever her rosy light.

THE BRITISH CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM.

HON. THOMAS D'ARCY M'GEE (1825-1868).

I take the British constitutional system as the great original system upon which are founded the institutions of all free States. I take it as one of a family born of Christian civilization. I take it as combining in itself permanence and liberty; liberty in its best form-not in theory alone, but in practice ; liberty which is enjoyed in fact by all the people of Canada, of every origin and of every creed.

Can any one pretend to say that a chapter of accidents which we can trace for eight hundred years, and which some antiquaries may even trace for a much longer period, will account for the permanence of these institutions? If you say that they have not in themselves the elements of permanence which preserve the foundations of a free State from one generation to another, how do you account for their continued and prosperous existence? How do you account for it, that of all the ancient constitutions of Europe this alone remains; and remains not only with all its ancient outlines, but with great modern improvements-improvements, however, made in harmony with the design of its first architects? Here is a form of government that has lasted, with modifications to suit the spirit of successive ages, for a period of eight hundred years. How is it that I account for the permanence of its institutions? By asserting that, in their outline plan, they combine all the good of material importance that has ever been discovered.

The wisdom of the middle ages, and the political writers of the present time, have all laid down one maxim of government, That no unmixed form of government can satisfy the wants of a free and intelligent people: that an unmixed