of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures.  The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual:  the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.  It is his mind which is laid bare.  This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it.  On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—­we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon 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 the mighty beast 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.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.  But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shown to our bodily eye!  Othello, for instance.  Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of the highest extraction, through the force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and color, and wedding with a coal-black Moor—­(for such he is represented, in the imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared with our