Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/154

Rh tions, and its tragical denouement, is the second, and but the second act of his madness The great mind, so vigorous in its mad ravings, with such clear insight into the heart of man that all the petty coverings of pre tence are stripped off in its wild eloquence, not only is unable to distinguish between the most forced and ful some flattery and the genuineness of deep and silent love; it cannot even see the folly of assuming to apportion the three exact and predetermined thirds of the kingdom according to the professions made in answer to the “silly trick;” cannot even see that after giving away two-thirds, the remainder is a fixed quantity, and cannot be more or less according to the warmth of the professions of his youngest and favorite daughter; a confusion not unlike the the account he subsequently gives of his own age—“four score and upwards; not an hour more or less.” With what courtly smoothness of pretence goes on the mocking scene, until real love, and obstinate temper, and disgust at her sisterºhyprocrisy, and repugnance perhaps at the trick she may see through, interrupt the old king's complacent vanity; and then the astonishment, the retained

ºš.

breath, the short sentences, the silence before the storm

and then the outbreak of unbridled rage, in that terrible curse in which he makes his darling daughter—her whom he loved best, whom he looked to as the nurse of his

age—for ever a stranger to his heart! It is madness or it is nothing. Not, indeed, raving, incoherent, formed mania, as it subsequently displays itself; but exaggerated

passion, perverted affection, enfeebled judgment, combining to form a state of mental disease—incipient indeed, but

still disease—in which man, though he may be paying for past errors, is for the present irresponsible. The language in which is couched the expostulations of the noble-minded Kent collected and even-tempered in all his