Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/188

Rh Lear. No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the King himself.

Edg. O thou side-piercing sight ! Lear. Nature's above art in that respect.—There's your press-money.

That fellow handles his bow like a crow

keeper: draw me a clothier's yard.—Look, look, a mouse ! Peace, peace;—this piece of toasted cheese will do 't.-There's my gauntlet: I’ll prove it on a giant.—Bring up the brown bills.-O, well flown bird —i'the clout, i'the clout: hewgh — Give the word.

Edg. Sweet marjoram. Lear. Pass. Glo. I know that voice.

Lear. Ha! Goneril —with a white beard —They flattered me like a dog; and told me I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say ay, and no, to every thing I said —Ay and no too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once.”





The withering denunciation of incontinency, “The wren goes to 't,” &c., and the grander one of injustice, “Thou rascal beadle,” &c., are too consecutively reasoned for the king's state of mind at this period. The apparent inconsistency is only to be accounted for by Lear's inherent grandeur of thought and natural eloquence, which even in frenzy rolls forth its magnificent volume, like nothing else I know of in poetry. It is not common to see incoherence alter nating with the precise expression of complex thought, but I have sometimes observed the phenomenon when the com plex thoughts, so expressed, have formed a part of the hoarded treasures of the mind.

And so it must be with Lear; the

eloquence of his madness is partly the result of an imagination always vivid and now stimulated to excess, and of an involuntary display of oratorical power, native to the man, and partly of profound knowledge of human nature, ac quired during an age of practical kingship. He speaks, as the bird sings, from inborn force, which neither anger, nor grief, nor madness, nor the pangs of approaching death, can subdue.