"O heavens!

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway

Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,

Make it your cause; send down and take my part!"

His spirit sank within him at the appearance of Goneril : a deadlier chill seizes upon it at a worse sight:

"O Regan! wilt thou take her by the hand?"

Once his mind seems to be wandering after Cordelia when he speaks of his "dowerless youngest born;" but his remaining pride sweeps the thought away, and there follows that wretched scene in which the helpless old king is bandied by the arguments of his daughters threatening and reasoning about the reduction of his retinue. When Lear speaks in answer-it is a strange utteranceat first, as if he would fain let his thoughts stray from his present misery into a region of abstractions; or, more probably, as if his mind were beginning to lose all law of its own, and were moved only by chance impulses, there is a train of mere speculative reasoning; then a supplication to heaven on behalf of his acknowledged poverty and wretchedness, disturbed, however, by dark infidel doubts that the gods may be the evil destinies to destroy him; then there is a desperate rallying of his mere human energy, fitfully broken with wild and royal threats, vague as the winds that are already heard preparing a rude reception for him on the heath:

"Oh, reason not the need-our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man's life is cheap as beasts'. Thou art a lady:

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,—
You heavens give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age-wretched in both.
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger.
Oh, let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!-No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall

-I will do such things,

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep.

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!"

Lear is now environed with his thick-thronging afflictions, and the dark presentiment of insanity has entered his mind. The moral tempest has raged its utmost, and the tragic effort is fitly sustained when the aged sufferer, houseless and hopeless, is found wandering over the desolate heath, exposed to the unsparing storm. At the very time that his intellect is becoming unsettled and there is the restlessness of a fevered brain, his thoughts discover a fitful and unwonted strength. Already he has sought to identify by a mighty grasp of the imagination his own old age with that of the heavens themselves, and now he feels in the beatings of the tempests the blows of his daughters:

"I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,

I never gave you kingdom, called you children;
But yet I call you servile ministers,

That have with two pernicious daughters joined
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head,
So old and white as this."

But most impressive is it to trace the effect of this severe chastening upon the king's moral nature. His closest sympathy now is with that humble creature who had been in prosperous days the light-hearted and privileged jester at the royal table, but who clings so faithfully to his mas ter's miseries. Lear's affection for his devoted favourite grows deeper and more sensitive:

"Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee."

His pity for the fool's exposure to the storm and cold, shows a self-forgetfulness which is a new element in Lear's character. When brought to the wretched hovel for shelter, he is solicitous to provide first for the fool; and this sympathy expands with a more comprehensive one for all suffering humanity, accompanied with a selfreproach for having, in his palmy days, taken too little heed of houseless poverty

"Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou may'st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just."

Lear's destiny demands a yet lower humiliation. The entanglements of his brain are becoming more perplexed, and you can trace the footsteps of his departing reason. There is coming on, as has been finely said by Mr. Hallam, "that sublime madness, not absurdly sudden as in some tragedies, but in which the strings that keep his

reasoning powers together, give way, one after another, with the phrensy of rage and grief. Then it is that we find, what in life may sometimes be seen, the intellectual energies grow stronger in calamity, and especially under wrong. An awful eloquence belongs to unmerited suffering. Thoughts burst out more profound than Lear in his prosperous hour could ever have conceived; inconsequent for such is the condition of madness-but, in themselves, fragments of coherent truth, the reason of the unreasonable mind."

We

It is when Lear is brought lowest that his good angel, the lost Cordelia, comes back to minister to him. first hear of her in that exquisite description-one of the most graphic that Shakspeare ever drew-of her receiving the letters narrating her father's affliction:

"She took them, read them in my presence;
And now and then an ample tear trill'd down
Her delicate cheek; it seem'd she was a queen
Over her passion; who, most rebel-like,
Sought to be king o'er her.

Kent. 0, then it moved her?

Gent. Not to a rage; patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like a better day. Those happy smiles
That play'd on her ripe lip, seem'd not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd. In brief, sorrow
Would be a rarity most beloved, if all

Could so become it.

Kent. Made she no verbal question?

Gent. Faith, once or twice, she heaved the name of father

Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart;

Cried, Sisters! sisters!--Shame of ladies! sisters!

Kent! father! sisters! What? i' the storm? i' the night?

Let pity not be believed!'-There she shook

The holy water from her heavenly eyes,

And clamour moisten'd: then away she started,

To deal with grief alone."

The turbulence of the tragedy now gives place to gentler emotions. After a tempest so ruinous, there break forth some rays of the pathetic light of sunset. A softer radiance is floating round Cordelia.

But Lear must not pass away from life in the darkness of insanity. The restoration of his mind is as inimitable as its aberration. When he awakes from his sleep of madness he is all gentleness-regenerate by the discipline of adversity and of his phrensy. One of the most beautiful dramatic passages ever composed is that where Cordelia is watching over her sleeping father-praying over him“0 you kind gods,

Cure this great breach in his abused nature.

The untuned and jarring senses, 0, wind up
Of this child-changed father."

The voice that, in happy days gone by, used to be music in his ears, is heard once more; and it is no wonder that, in his waking bewilderment, Lear answers her question whether he knows her

"You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?"

The shrill accents of Goneril and Regan had been the horrid sounds he listened to, and then the stormy noises of an angry sky; but now the melody of Cordelia's voice carries him into the world of spirits. When his daughter beseeches his blessing, his confused recollections begin to shape themselves:

"Pray, do not mock me:

I am a very foolish, fond old man,