So on the tip of his subduing tongue
All kind of arguments and question deep,
All replication prompt, and reason strong,
For his advantage still did wake and sleep:
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,
He had the dialect and different skill,
Catching all passions in his craft at will.

The Poet often so orders his delineations as to start and propel the mind backwards over a large tract of memory. As in real life, the persons, when they first come to our knowledge, bring each their several dower of good or evil inherited from their past hours. What they are now, remembers what they were long ago; and in their to-day we have the slow cumulative result of a great many yesterdays. Thus even his most ideal characters are invested with a sort of historic verisimilitude: the effects of what they thought and did long before still remain with them; and in their present speech and action is opened to us a long-drawn vista of retrospection. And this is done not in the way of narrative, but of suggestion; the antecedent history being merely implied, not related, in what is given. Sometimes he makes the persons speak and act from their whole character at once; that is, not only from those parts of it which are seen, but from those which lie back out of sight; from hidden causes, from motives unavowed, and even from springs and impulses of which the subject himself is not conscious. The effect of this is quite remarkable, and such as to outstrip the swiftest wing of analysis. It sends us right beyond the characters to Nature herself, and to the common elementary principles of all character; so touching the mind's receptive powers as to kindle its active and productive powers.

Lear is among the Poet's finest instances, perhaps his very finest, in this art of historical perspective. The old King

speaks out from a large fund of vanishing recollections; and in his present we have the odour and efficacy of a remote and varied past. The play forecasts and prepares, from the outset, that superb intellectual ruin where we have "matter and impertinency mix'd, reason in madness"; the earlier transpirations of the character being shaped and ordered with a view to that end. Certain presages and predispositions of insanity are manifest in his behaviour from the first, as the joint result of nature, of custom, and of superannuation. We see in him something of constitutional rashness of temper, which moreover has long been fostered by the indulgences and flatteries incident to his station, and which, through the cripplings of age, is now working loose from the restraints of his manlier judgment. He has been a wise and good man, strong in reason, in just feeling, and rectitude of purpose, but is now decidedly past his faculties; which however, as often happens, is unapparent to him save as he feels it in a growing indisposition to the cares and labours of his office. So that there is something of truth in what Goneril says of him; just enough to make her appear the more hateful in speaking of it as she does: "The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of long-ingraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them." He is indeed full of inconstant starts and petty gusts of impatience, such as are excusable only in those who have not yet reached, and those who have plainly outlived, the period of discretion and selfrestraint.

These growing infirmities of nature and time are viewed by his children with very different feelings. The two elder are inwardly glad of them. They secretly exult in the de

cays and dilapidations of his manhood as incapacitating him. for his office, and so speeding their hopes of the inheritance. They know it is his disease to be gratified with such hollow and hyperbolical soothings as would else be the height of insolence. And so in the name of duty they study to inflame the waywardness that provokes their scorn. They crave reasons for persecuting him, and therefore will say any thing, will do any thing, to pamper the faults which at once prompt and seem to justify their contempt of him. In a word, it is their pleasure to bring oil to his fire, that he may the sooner be burnt out of their way.

With Cordelia all this is just reversed. The infirmities of a beloved and venerated father are things which she does not willingly see; when she sees, she pities them; and in a true filial spirit never thinks of them but as a motive to greater tenderness and respect. That his mind is falling out of tune, inspires her with the deeper reverence: she would rather go mad herself than see him do so. Partly from a conscious purpose, but more from an instinct of dutiful affection, she tries to assuage and postpone his distemper with the temperate speech of simple truth; duty and love alike forbidding her to stimulate his disease with the strong waters of fleering and strained hyperbole. Then too a fine moral tact seems to warn her that the medicine of reason must be administered to the dear old man in very gentle doses, else it will but feed his evil. And her treatment is well adapted to keep his faculties in tune, but that her holy purpose is baffled by the fulsome volubility of her sisters.

The first two speeches of the play inform us that the division of the kingdom has already been resolved upon, the terms of the division arranged, and the several portions allotted. This fact is significant, and goes far to interpret the

subsequent action, inasmuch as it infers the trial of profes sions to be but a trick of the King's, designed, perhaps, to surprise his children into expressions which filial modesty would else forbid. Lear has a morbid hungering after the outward tokens of affection: he is not content to know that the heart beats for him, but craves to feel and count over its beatings. The passion is indeed a selfish one, but it is the selfishness of a right-generous and loving nature. Such a diseased longing for sympathy is not the growth of an unsympathizing heart. And Lear naturally looks for the strongest professions where he feels the deepest attachment. "I loved her most, and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery,” — such is his declared preference of Cordelia. And the same thing comes out still more forcibly when, hearing him speak of her as

Unfriended, new-adopted to our hate,

Dower'd with our curse, and stranger'd with our oath,

the King of France replies,

This is most strange,

That she, who even but now was your best object,
The argument of your praise, balm of your age,

The best, the dearest, should in this trice of time
Commit a thing so monstrous, to dismantle
So many folds of favour.

And the same doting fondness that suggested the device makes Lear angry at its defeat; while its success with the first two heightens his irritation at its failure with the third. Thwarted of his hope where he has centred it most and held it surest, his weakness naturally flames out in a transport of rage. Still it is not any doubt of Cordelia's love, but a dotage of his trick that frets and chafes him. For the device is a pet with him. And such a bauble of strategy would

have had no place in his thoughts, had he been of a temper to bear the breaking of it. Being thus surprised into a tempest of passion, in the disorder of his mind he at once forgets the thousand little daily acts that have insensibly wrought in him to love Cordelia most, and to expect most love from her. His behaviour towards her, indeed, is like that of a peevish, fretful child who, if prevented from kissing his nurse, falls to striking her.

Men sometimes take a strange pleasure in acting without or against reason; since this has to their feelings the effect of ascertaining and augmenting their power; as if they could make a right or a truth of their own. It appears to be on some such principle as this that arbitrariness, or a making of the will its own reason, sometimes becomes a passion in men. Such a stress of self-will proceeds, I apprehend, on much the same ground as Sir Thomas Browne's faith, which delighted in making honours for itself out of impossibilities. That certain things could not be, was, he tells us, his strongest argument for believing them; that is, he felt the surer of his creed as it reversed the laws of thought, and grew by the contradictions of reason. The very shame, too, of doing wrong sometimes hurries men into a barring of themselves off from retreat. And so it appears to be with Lear in his treatment of Cordelia. In the first place, he will do the thing because he knows it to be wrong; and then the uneasy sense of a wrong done prompts him to bind the act with an oath; that is, because he ought not to have driven the nail, therefore he clinches it. This action of mind is indeed abnormal, and belongs to what may be termed the border-land of sanity and madness; nevertheless something very like it is not seldom met with in men who are supposed to be in full possession of their wits.