Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/190

Rh Lear. When we are born, we cry, that we are come To this great stage of fools; This a good block — It were a delicate stratagem, to shoe

A troop of horse with felt : I’ll put it in proof; And when I have stolen upon these sons-in-law, Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.”

Here is the inexpugnable notion of kingly power; then the rambling “pull off my boots;” then tardy pity for Gloster, and consolation in the spirit of the doctrine that we are born to trouble; then the strange idea chain, that consolation shall be given in the form of a religious discourse, which brings the hat under observation, “a good block;” this the silent cavalry and the stolen revenge. A more perfect representation of wandering intellect it is impossible to conceive.

Even his

own pitiful recognition of his state assumes a form of expres sion, half incoherent, half poetical. He no longer distinguishes friends from foes, and with other changed feelings, he has become susceptiblé of fear. When this is removed, he per ceives clearly enough that his personal liberty is not secure even from his friends, and away he decamps, poor old king, a veritable type of gay, incoherent mania. Incoherency, the characteristic of rapid and irregular idealization, is so far

from being a definite quality, like a clear-cut delusion, that its degree may vary from the slight fault in the sequence and order of ideas which may be observed in the earliest stages of excitement from wine, to that ceaseless and utterly unin telligible babble, which is observed in some chronic lunatics. Extreme degrees of incoherency are invariably associated with advanced decay of the mental powers. Perception and memory are greatly enfeebled ; the power of comparison is clean gone. A ceaseless flow of shallow images ripples over the mind, and continues ever after. All power of attention to new objects is lost; in some cases the babble of words appears to be continued, even after the mind has ceased to reflect the

pale spectres of thought which they once represented. In