Your own ladies and pale-visag’d maids
  Like Amazons come tripping after drums: 
  Their thimbles into armed gauntlets change,
  Their needles to lances, and their gentle hearts
  To fierce and bloody inclination.

Lastly, Queen Isabella’s blessing, spoken over King Henry V and his
French bride, predicts an enduring friendship between England and
France: 

  As man and wife, being two, are one in love,
  So be there ’twixt your kingdoms such a spousal,
  That never may ill office, or fell jealousy,
  Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage,
  Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms,
  To make divorce of their incorporate league;
  That English may as French, French Englishmen,
  Receive each other!  God speak this Amen!

One of the delights of a literature as rich and as old as ours is that at every step we take backwards we find ourselves again.  We are delivered from that foolish vein of thought, so dear to ignorant conceit, which degrades the past in order to exalt the present and the future.  It is easy to feel ourselves superior to men who no longer breathe and walk, and whom we do not trouble to understand.  Here is the real benefit of scholarship; it reduces men to kinship with their race.  Science, pressing forward, and beating against the bars which guard the secrets of the future, has no such sympathy in its gift.

Anyhow, in Shakespeare’s time, England was already old England; which if she could ever cease to be, she might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, but would not be England at all.  What Shakespeare and his fellows of the sixteenth century gave her was a new self-consciousness and a new self-confidence.  They foraged in the past; they recognized themselves in their ancestors; they found feudal England, which had existed for many hundreds of years, a dumb thing; and when she did not know her own meaning, they endowed her purposes with words.  They gave her a new delight in herself, a new sense of power and exhilaration, which has remained with her to this day, surviving all the airy philosophic theories of humanity which thought to supersede the old solid national temper.  The English national temper is better fitted for traffic with the world than any mere doctrine can ever be, for it is marked by an immense tolerance.  And this, too, Shakespeare has expressed.  Falstaff is perhaps the most tolerant man who was ever made in God’s image.  But it is rather late in the day to introduce Falstaff to an English audience.  Perhaps you will let me modernize a brief scene from Shakespeare, altering nothing essential, to illustrate how completely his spirit is the spirit of our troops in Flanders and France.