Thouars, so that Constance is incorrectly represented as in a state of widowhood, at a period when, in point of fact, she was married. It may be observed that her marriage took place just at the period of the opening of the drama; that Guy de Thouars played no conspicuous part in the affairs of Bretagne till after the death of Constance, and that the mere presence of this personage, altogether superfluous in the action, would have completely destroyed the dramatic interest of the situation; and what a situation! One more magnificent was never placed before the mind's eye than that of Constance, when, deserted and betrayed, she stands alone in her despair, amid her false friends and her ruthless enemies! The image of the mother-eagle, wounded and bleeding to death, yet stretched over her young attitude of defiance, while all the baser birds of prey are clamouring around her eyry, gives but a faint idea of the moral sublimity of this scene. Considered merely

1 King John, act iii., scene 1.

in an

as a poetical or dramatic picture, the grouping is wonderfully fine; on one side, the vulture ambition of that mean-souled tyrant, John; on the other, the selfish, calculating policy of Philip: between them, balancing their passions in his hand, the cold, subtle, heartless Legate: the fiery, reckless Falconbridge; the princely Louis; the still unconquered spirit of that wrangling queen, old Elinor; the bridal loveliness and modesty of Blanche; the boyish grace and innocence of young Arthur; and Constance in the midst of them, in all the state of her great grief, a grand impersonation of pride and passion, helpless at once and desperate,— form an assemblage of figures, each perfect in its kind, and, taken all together, not surpassed for the variety, force, and splendour of the dramatic and picturesque

effect.

Elinor of Guienne, and Blanche of Castile, who form part of the group around Constance, are sketches merely, but they are strictly historical portraits, and full of truth and spirit.

At the period when Shakspeare has brought these three women on the scene together, Elinor of Guienne (the daughter of the last Duke of Guienne and Aquitaine, and like Constance, the heiress of a sovereign duchy), was near the close of her long, various, and unquiet life-she was nearly seventy: and, as in early youth, her violent passions had overborne both principle and policy, so in her old age we see the same character, only modified by time: her strong intellect and love of power, unbridled by conscience or principle, surviving when other passions were extinguished, and rendered more dangerous by a degree of subtlety and self-command to which her youth had been a stranger. Her personal and avowed hatred for Constance, together with its motives, are mentioned by the old historians. Holinshed expressly says, that Queen Elinor was mightily set against her grandson Arthur, rather moved thereto by envy conceived against his mother, than by any fault of the young prince, for that she knew and

dreaded the high spirit of the Lady Con

stance.

Shakspeare has rendered this with equal spirit and fidelity.

QUEEN ELINOR.

What now, my son! have I not ever said,
How that ambitious Constance would not cease,

Till she had kindled France and all the world

Upon the right and party of her son?

This might have been prevented and made whole
With very easy arguments of love;

Which now the manage of two kingdoms must

With fearful bloody issue arbitrate.

KING JOHN.

Our strong possession and our right for us!

QUEEN ELINOR.

Your strong possession much more than your right;
Or else it must go wrong with you and me.

So much my conscience whispers in your ear-
Which none but Heaven, and you, and I, shall hear.

Queen Elinor preserved to the end of her life her influence over her children, and appears to have merited their respect. While entrusted with the government, during the absence of Richard I., she ruled with a steady hand, and made herself

exceedingly popular; and as long as she lived to direct the counsels of her son John, his affairs prospered. For that intemperate jealousy which converted her into a domestic firebrand, there was at least much cause, though little excuse. Elinor had hated and wronged the husband of her youth,' and she had afterwards to endure the negligence and innumerable infidelities of the husband whom she passionately loved :"and so the whirlygig of time brought in his revenges." Elinor died in 1203, a few months after Constance, and before the murder of Arthur-a crime which, had she lived, would probably never have been consummated; for the nature of Elinor, though violent, had no tincture of the baseness and cruelty of her son.

1 Louis VII. of France, whom she was accustomed to call, in contempt, the monk. Elinor's adventures in Syria, whither she accompanied Louis on the second Crusade, would form a romance.

2 Henry II. of England. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the story of Fair Rosamond, as far as Elinor is concerned, is a mere invention of some ballad-maker of later times.