Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/162

Rh To suffer with the body: I’ll forbear; And am fallen out with my more headier will, To take the indispos'd and sickly fit For the sound man.—Death on my state wherefore Should he sit here? This act persuades me, That this remotion of the duke and her

Is practice only. Give me my servant forth : Go, tell the duke and his wife, I’d speak with them,

Now, presently: bid them come forth and hear me, Or at their chamber door I'll beat the drum,

Till it cry—death to sleep. Glo. I’d have all well betwixt you. Lear. O me, my heart, my rising heart!—but down.” The first indication of commencing incoherence is seen in

this most affecting expression of the conflict within : “commands, tends, service;”—unless it be that the rapid flow of ideas only permits the expression of the leading words, omitting the connecting ones which would make sense of them.

There is more of

sorrow,

than

of

haughty passion, in this conflict of emotion ; the strong will resisting the stronger passion, and attempting to palliate and explain the evidence of that indignity, upon which it is too justly founded. The Fool's philosophy, that absurd cruelty and absurd kindness have the same origin, is well introduced at this point; though little likely to attract his frantic master's attention, whose unreasoning generosity to his daughter is now replaced by unmeasured rage and hatred.

“Fool. Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels, when she put them i' the paste alive ; she knapp'd 'em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cry’d, Down, wantons, down :

'Twas her brother, that, in pure kindness to his horse, butter'd his hay.” Lear is evidently more unwilling to quarrel with Regan than he was with Goneril.

He loves her better; and in

deed,(if any difference can be marked between these most bad women, the temper and disposition of Regan are L”