Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/209

 No person—not even the shrewd, observing Fool—had detected in these early inconstancies of the King the tokens of impending insanity. But Shakspeare meant, no doubt, that the whim of abdication, the division of the kingdom, and the absurd project to travel with a hundred knights from one daughter's house to another, should hint to us that the royal brain was breaking down. An expert in the phenomena of insanity would have predicted what occurred so suddenly. But it shocked these unprepared beholders, and curdled every smile on the Fool's face into lines of mockery that ran full with tears. No king's misfortune was ever so bantered by its own pathos, as love and loyalty, contrasting with ingratitude, subsidized a Fool for the service of pity.

But he cannot long employ his Irony upon our hearts, for events develop a dread earnest temper. There is no longer place for insinuation in the scene. The fortune of Lear seems to challenge all the elements to match it. As the reason topples, it appears to be clutching at the sky to save itself, and brings it down in the winds and lightnings of midnight to sympathize with its own eclipse. The Fool is cowed by the madness and the storm as they intermingle; his brave innuendoes die away; and he supplicates Lear, in plain language of human discomfort, to seek some shelter, even under such a blessing as one of his daughters can bestow, for that seems less inclement than the night. His vein runs very thin during Lear's delusion that he has his daughters in court and is trying them; and it soon