ACT II. SCENE I.-London. A Room in Ely-House. GAUNT on York. Vex not yourself, nor strive not with your breath; Gaunt. O, but they say, the tongues of dying men Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain ; Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose; As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last; York. No; it is stopp'd with other flattering sounds, Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity, And thus, expiring, do foretell of him ; His rash, fierce blaze of riot cannot last; [4] Our author, who gives to all nations the customs of England, and to all ages the manners of his own, has charged the times of Richard with a folly not perbaps known then, but very frequent in Shakespeare's time, and much lamented by the wisest and best of our ancestors. JOHNSON. [5] Where the will rebels against the notices of the understanding. JOHNSON. (6) Do not attempt to guide him, who, whatever thou shalt say, will take his own course. JOHNSON. For violent fires soon burn out themselves : Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short; With eager feeding, food doth choke the feeder : Consuming means, soon preys upon itself. This fortress, built by nature for herself, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, Enter King RICHARD and QUEEN; AUMERLE, BUSHY, York. The king is come: deal mildly with his youth; For young hot colts, being rag'd, do rage the more. [7] I once suspected that for infection we might read invasion; but the copies all agree, and I suppose Shakespeare meant to say, that islanders are secured by their situation both from war and pestilence. JOHNSON. [8] Shakespeare, as Mr. Walpole suggests to me, has deviated from historical truth in the introduction of Richard's queen as a woman in the present piece; Queen. How fares our noble uncle, Lancaster? K. Rich. What comfort, man? How is't with aged Gaunt ? And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt? K. Rich. Can sick men play so nicely with their names? I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee. K. Rich. Should dying men flatter with those that live? Gaunt. No, no; men living flatter those that die. K. Rich. Thou, now a dying, say'st-thou flatter'st me. Gaunt. Oh! no; thou diest, though I the sicker be. K. Rich, I am in health, I breathe, and see thee ill. Gaunt. Now, He that made me, knows I see thee ill⚫ Ill in myself to see, and in thee seeing ill. Thy death-bed is no lesser than the land, Wherein thou liest in reputation sick : And thou, too careless patient as thou art, Commit'st thy anointed body to the cure Of those physicians that first wounded thee: A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown, Whose compass is no bigger than thy head; And yet, incaged in so small a verge, The waste is no whit lesser than thy land. O, had thy grandsire, with a prophet's eye, Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame; Which art possess'd now to depose thyself. for Anne his first wife, was dead before the play commences, and Isabella, his second wife, was a child at the time of his death. MALONE. Is it not more than shame, to shame it so? K. Rich. -a lunatic lean-witted fool, Make pale our cheeks; chasing the royal blood, Now by my seat's right royal majesty, Wert thou not brother to great Edward's son, This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head, Should run thy head from thy unreverend shoulders. That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp'd out, and drunkenly carous'd: That thou respect'st not spilling Edward's blood : [Exit, borne out by his Attendants. K. Rich. And let them die, that age and sullens have ; For both hast thou, and both become the grave. York. 'Beseech your majesty, impute his words To wayward sickliness and age in him: He love's you, on my life, and holds you dear As Harry duke of Hereford, were he here. K. Rich. Right; you say true: as Hereford's love, so his : As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is. [9] The reasoning of Gaunt, I think, is this; " By setting thy royalties to farm thou hast reduced thy self to a state below sovereignty, thou art now no longer king but landlord of England, subject to the same restraint and limitations as other landlords; by making thy condition a state of law, a condition upon which the common rules of law can operate, thou art become a bondslave to the law; thou hast made thyself amenable to laws from which thou wert originally exempt." JOHNSON. [1] That is, Let them love. JOHNSON. Enter NORTHUMBERLAND. North. My liege, old Gaunt commends him to your majesty. K. Rich. What says he now? North. Nay, nothing; all is said: His tongue is now a stringless instrument; Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent. York. Be York the next that must be bankrupt so! K. Rich. The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; And for these great affairs do ask some charge, York. How long shall I be patient? Ah, how long Not Gloster's death, nor Hereford's banishment, Of whom thy father, prince of Wales, was first; [2] This alludes to a tradition that St. Patrick freed the kingdom of Ireland from venomous reptiles of every kind. STEEVENS. [3] When the duke of Hereford, after his banishment, went into France, he was honourably entertained at that court, and would have obtained in marriage the only daughter of the duke of Berry, uncle to the French king, had not Richard prevented the match. STEEVENS. 8 VOL. V. |