There is much virtue in an ‘if,’ and the poet repeats the warning in another play. In ‘3 Henry VI.’ Hastings says:
‘Why, knows not Montague that of itself
England is safe, if true within itself?’
That, again, which most troubles John of Gaunt, in the passage already quoted, is the fact that England, which was wont to conquer others, ‘Hath made a shameful conquest of itself;’ while Chorus, in ‘Henry V.,’ laments that France has found in England ‘a nest of hollow bosoms, which he fills with treacherous crowns,’ adding,
‘What might’st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural?’
Here, then, is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true in his own day is equally, nay more, true now—that England, ‘set in a silver sea,’ is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer at the hands of her own ‘degenerate and ingrate’ sons.
HEREDITY IN SONG.
