of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on the corruptions and abuses of mankind.  What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that “they themselves are old!” What gesture shall we appropriate to this?  What has the voice or the eye to do with such things?  But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show:  it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending.  It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too.  Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw it about more easily.  A happy ending!—­as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,—­the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him.  If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world’s burden after, why all this pudder and preparation—­why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy?  As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station—­as if at his years and with his experience anything was left but to die.’ [Footnote:  See an article, called ‘Theatralia’, in the second volume of the Reflector, by Charles Lamb.]

Four things have struck us in reading Lear: 

1.  That poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in human life.  Whoever therefore has a contempt for poetry, has a contempt for himself and humanity.

2.  That the language of poetry is superior to the language of painting; because the strongest of our recollections relate to feelings, not to faces.

3.  That the greatest strength of genius is shown in describing the strongest passions:  for the power of the imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of them.

4.  That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against the pain in tragedy is, that in proportion to the greatness of the evil, is our sense and desire of the opposite good excited; and that our sympathy with actual suffering is lost in the strong impulse given to our natural affections, and carried away with the swell-ing tide of passion, that gushes from and relieves the heart.

RICHARD II