Page:The Stratford gallery.djvu/294

224 The condition on which King Lear had abdicated his sovereign rights, in favor of his daughters and their husbands, was: that he, attended by a hundred chosen knights, should be entertained at their palaces alternately, while he should retain the name and all "the additions to a king."

It was not long before Goneril found it irksome to accommodate her father's attendants, and regarded them as an unnecessary expense; her own servants were therefore instructed to annoy his majesty with petty indignities; and when he remonstrated, she rebuffed him with a cool contempt that astounded him. Appealing from Goneril to Regan, the unhappy father fared even worse; for the latter co-operated with her sister to divest him of all the outward shows of state; and at last she drove him forth in a howling storm at night, when the exposure, added to the sharp sense of his children's ingratitude, drove the poor old man mad.

He was blessed, however, in one faithful follower—the Earl of Kent, whom he had banished for interceding in behalf of Cordelia, but who, in disguise, had returned to the service of his beloved master. This loyal nobleman housed the king in his own castle, and sent letters to the court of France for Cordelia, who was ignorant of her father's wretchedness. Hastening, with an army contributed by her husband, to the rescue of her outraged parent, she found him almost hopelessly crazed; but by kind nursing he was restored sufficiently to recognize and bless her. Unfortunately for the brave and devoted lady, her army was defeated by the superior force with which Goneril and Regan opposed it; Lear and Cordelia were consigned to a prison, where she was hung, by order of Goneril and her paramour; and her father, paralyzed by this last blow, breathed his last on her beloved corse.