This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
     When dying clouds contend with growing light,
     What time the shepherd blowing of his nails,
     Can neither call it perfect day or night. 
     Here on this mole-hill will I sit me down;
     To whom God will, there be the victory! 
     For Margaret my Queen, and Clifford too,
     Have chid me from the battle; swearing both
     They prosper best of all when I am thence. 
     Would I were dead, if God’s good will were so. 
     For what is in this world but grief and woe? 
     O God! methinks it were a happy life
     To be no better than a homely swain,
     To sit upon a hill as I do now,
     To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
     Thereby to see the minutes how they run: 
     How many make the hour full complete,
     How many hours bring about the day,
     How many days will finish up the year,
     How many years a mortal man may live. 
     When this is known, then to divide the times: 
     So many hours must I tend my flock,
     So many hours must I take my rest,
     So many hours must I contemplate,
     So many hours must I sport myself;
     So many days my ewes have been with young,
     So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean,
     So many months ere I shall shear the fleece: 
     So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years
     Past over, to the end they were created,
     Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. 
     Ah! what a life were this! how sweet, how lovely! 
     Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
     To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
     Than doth a rich embroidered canopy
     To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery? 
     O yes it doth, a thousand-fold it doth. 
     And to conclude, the shepherds’ homely curds,
     His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
     His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,
     All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
     Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,
     His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
     His body couched in a curious bed,
     When care, mistrust, and treasons wait on him.

This is a true and beautiful description of a naturally quiet and contented disposition, and not, like the former, the splenetic effusion of disappointed ambition.

In the last scene of Richard ii his despair lends him courage:  he beats the keeper, slays two of his assassins, and dies with imprecations in his mouth against Sir Pierce Exton, who ’had staggered his royal person’.  Henry, when he is seized by the deer-stealers, only reads them a moral lecture on the duty of allegiance and the sanctity of an oath; and when stabbed by Gloucester in the Tower, reproaches him with his crimes, but pardons him his own death.

RICHARD III