The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the purpose.  It is the only ground on which such a story could be built with the greatest truth and effect.  It is his rash haste, his violent impetuosity, his blindness to everything but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes, that aggravates his impatience of them, that enforces our pity for him.  The part which Cordelia bears in the scene is extremely beautiful:  the story is almost told in the first words she utters.  We see at once the precipice on which the poor old king stands from his own extravagant and credulous importunity, the indiscreet simplicity of her love (which, to be sure, has a little of her father’s obstinacy in it) and the hollowness of her sisters’ pretensions.  Almost the first burst of that noble tide of passion, which runs through the play, is in the remonstrance of Kent to his royal master on the injustice of his sentence against his youngest daughter—­’Be Kent unmannerly, when Lear is mad!’ This manly plainness which draws down on him the displeasure of the unadvised king is worthy of the fidelity with which he adheres to his fallen fortunes.  The true character of the two eldest daughters, Regan and Gonerill (they are so thoroughly hateful that we do not even like to repeat their names) breaks out in their answer to Cordelia who desires them to treat their father well—­’Prescribe not us our duties’—­their hatred of advice being in proportion to their determination to do wrong, and to their hypocritical pretensions to do right.  Their deliberate hypocrisy adds the last finishing to the odiousness of their characters.  It is the absence of this detestable quality that is the only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard, and that at times reconciles us to him.  We are not tempted to exaggerate the guilt of his conduct, when he himself gives it up as a bad business, and writes himself down ‘plain villain’.  Nothing more can be said about it.  His religious honesty in this respect is admirable.  One speech of his is worth a million.  His father, Gloster, whom he has just deluded with a forged story of his brother Edgar’s designs against his life, accounts for his unnatural behaviour and the strange depravity of the times from the late eclipses in the sun and moon.  Edmund, who is in the secret, says when he is gone:  ’This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars:  as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.  An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!  My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s tale, and my nativity was under Ursa Major:  so