to espouse her cause; cause; and proposed a match between the prince her son and his daughter Anne of Warwick—the “gentle Lady Anne," who figures in Richard the Third. In the play, Margaret embraces the offer without a moment's hesitation:1 we are disgusted by her versatile policy, and a meanness of spirit in no way allied to the magnanimous forgiveness of her terrible adversary. The Margaret of history sternly resisted this degrading expedient. She could not, she said, pardon from her heart, the man who had been the primary cause of all her misfortunes. She mistrusted Warwick, despised him for the motives of his revolt from Edward, and considered that to match her son into the family of her enemy from mere policy, was a species of degradation. It took Louis the Eleventh, with all his art and eloquence, fifteen days to wring 1 See Henry VI. Part III., Act iii., sc. 3— QUEEN MARGaret. Warwick, these words have turned my hate to love : And joy, that thou becom'st King Henry's friend. a reluctant consent, accompanied with tears, from this high-hearted woman. The speech of Margaret to her council of generals before the battle of Tewkesbury (Act v., scene 5), is as remarkable a specimen of false rhetoric, as her address to the soldiers on the eve of the fight, is of true and passionate eloquence. She witnesses the final defeat of her army, the massacre of her adherents, and the murder of her son; and though the savage Richard would willingly have put an end to her misery, and exclaims very pertinently— Why should she live to fill the world with words? she is dragged forth unharmed, a woful spectacle of extremest wretchedness, to which death would have been an undeserved relief. If we compare the clamorous and loud exclaims of Margaret after the slaughter of her son, to the ravings of Constance, we shall perceive where Shakspeare's genius did not preside, and where it did. Margaret, in bold defiance of history, but with fine dramatic effect, is introduced again in the VOL. II. S gorgeous and polluted court of Edward the Fourth. There she stalks around the seat of her former greatness, like a terrible phantom of departed majesty, uncrowned, unsceptred, desolate, powerless-or like a vampire thirsting for blood-or like a grim prophetess of evil, imprecating that ruin on the head of her enemies, which she lived to see realized. The scene following the murder of the princes in the Tower, in which Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York sit down on the ground bewailing their desolation, and Margaret suddenly appears from behind them, like the very personification of woe, and seats herself beside them revelling in their despair, is, in the general conception and effect, grand and appalling. THE DUCHESS. O, Harry's wife, triumph not in my woes; QUEEN MARGaret. Bear with me, I am hungry for revenge, And now I cloy me with beholding it. Thy Edward he is dead, that kill'd my Edward; Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward: Young York he is but boot, because both they Thy Clarence he is dead, that stabb'd my Edward; The adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey, And send them thither. But at hand, at hand, Ensues his piteous and unpitied end; Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar for him; saints pray To have him suddenly convey'd from hence. That I may live to say, The dog is dead.1 She should have stopped here; but the effect thus powerfully excited is marred and weakened by so much superfluous rhetoric, that we are tempted to exclaim with the old Duchess of York Why should calamity be full of words? 1 Horace Walpole observes, that "it is evident from the conduct of Shakspeare, that the house of Tudor retained all their Lancasterian prejudices even in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In his play of Richard the Third, he seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the curses which Queen Margaret had vented against them; and he could not give that weight to her curses, without supposing a right in her to utter them." QUEEN KATHERINE OF ARRAGON. To have a just idea of the accuracy and beauty of this historical portrait, we ought to bring immediately before us those circumstances of Katherine's life and times, and those parts of her character, which belong to a period previous to the opening of the play. We shall then be better able to appreciate the skill with which Shakspeare has applied the materials before him. Katherine of Arragon, the fourth and youngest daughter of Ferdinand king of Arragon, and Isabella of Castile, was born at Alcala, whither her mother had retired to winter after one of the most terrible campaigns of the Moorish war-that of 1485. Katherine had derived from nature no dazzling qualities of mind, and no striking |