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"Thus may we gather honey from the weed,

And make a moral of the devil himself."

When King Henry borrows Sir Thomas Erpingham's cloak, and withdraws for a time, he still represents the soldier in the wars of life, who, when some great struggle is before him, communes first with his own heart, and seeks to be alone with God:

"I and my bosom must debate awhile,
And then I would no other company;

"

on which Sir Thomas Erpingham exclaims:

"The Lord in heaven bless thee, noble Harry." The king meets in the camp, unknown to them, Pistol, Fluellen, and the soldiers who speak of the responsibility of those who bring men to be killed in battle, unprepared to meet their God. Again there is the most direct expression of the evil of war associated with suggestion of the responsibility upon the king, "when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day," and cry all of the hurt done to their wives and children and their own The disguised king's souls by their sudden death. answer to them is deeply religious in its close: "Every subject's duty is the king's; but every Therefore should every subject's soul is his own. soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were making God so free an

The next scene, the third of the Fourth Act, returns to the English camp, where the king has ridden forth to view the army of the French, outnumbering his own men by five to one. cries, "God's arm strike with us! 'tis a fearful Salisbury odds." Westmoreland wishes for "but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day." King Henry as he enters hears the wish, and animates his comrades with his courage. French are ready; and for the English, says the The king, "All things are ready if our minds be so." The soldiers kneel as the king says, "You know your places; God be with you all."

There is another answer to the herald's message for the French, secure of victory. The Duke of

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"Take it, brave York.-Now, soldiers, march away : And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day!"

Then follow in succession the false glory of Pistol ; the boastful among the angry sense of defeat French, who seek to rally for one more attack; the pathetic story of the death upon the battlefield of the Earl of Suffolk and the Duke of York, tempering again with the fine spirit of humanity the story of the English fight:

"Suffolk first died: and York, all haggled over,
Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteeped,
And takes him by the beard; kisses the gashes
That bloodily did yawn upon his face;
And cries aloud, 'Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk!
My soul shall keep thine company to heaven.'

The scene dwells upon this theme of love and tenderness, then at the end Shakespeare slips in the order of the king, that might be taken as a blot his conduct of the day : upon

"But hark, what new alarum is this same ?—

The French have reinforced their scattered men.
Then every soldier kill his prisoners;
Give the word through."

The first words of the next scene extenuate the
cruelty of this command by the dialogue between
Fluellen and Gower, which shows that the French
have killed the boys who were with the luggage;
and when Fluellen runs on to compare the gallant
king to Alexander the Great, attention is again
diverted by Fluellen's showing that Alexander
the Great killed his best friend, Clytus, being in
and his cups; while Harry Monmouth,

With further dwelling on this note the Fourth Act closes.

In the Fifth Act, Pistol, the opposite to the true warrior eats the leek Honey i