very interesting tragedies may be written, that are not founded on gallantry and love; and that Boileau was mistaken when he affirmed,

Est

de l'amour la sensible peinture,

pour aller au cœur la route la plus sure.

Those tender scenes that pictur'd love impart,

Insure success and best engage the heart.

The distresses in this tragedy are of a very uncommon nature, and are not touched upon by any other dramatic author. They are occasioned by a rash resolution of an aged monarch of strong passions and quick sensibility, to resign his crown, and to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters; the youngest of whom, who was his favourite, not answering his sanguine expectations in expressions of affection to him, he for ever banishes, and endows her sisters with her allotted share. Their unnatural ingratitude, the intolerable affronts, indignities, and cruelties he suffers from them, and the remorse he feels from his imprudent resignation of his power, at first inflame him with the most violent rage, and by degrees drive him to madness and death. This is the outline of the fable.

I shall confine myself at present to consider singly the judgment and art of the poet, in describing the origin and progress of the distraction of Lear, in which, I think, he has succeeded better than any other writer; even than Euripides himself,

whom Longinus so highly commends for his representation of the madness of Orestes.

It is well contrived that the first affront that is offered Lear should be a proposal from Gonerill, his eldest daughter, to lessen the number of his knights, which must needs affect and irritate a person so jealous of his rank and the respect due to it. He is at first astonished at the complicated impudence and ingratitude of this design, but quickly kindles into rage, and resolves to depart instantly:

Darkness and devils!

Saddle my horses, call my train together-
Degen'rate bastard! I'll not trouble thee.-

This is followed by a severe reflection upon his own folly for resigning his crown, and a solemn invocation to Nature to heap the most horrible curses on the head of Gonerill, that her own offspring may prove equally cruel and unnatural:

that she may feel,

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

When Albany demands the cause of this passion, Lear answers, 'I'll tell thee!' but immediately cries out to Gonerill,

Life and death! I am asham'd,

That thou hast

power to shake my

manhood thus.

Blasts and fogs upon thee!

Th' untented woundings of a father's curse

Pierce every sense about thee!

He stops a little, and reflects:

-Ha! is it come to this?

Let it be so! I have another daughter,

Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable.

When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails
She'll flea thy wolfish visage.

He was, however, mistaken; for the first object he encounters in the castle of the Earl of Gloucester, whither he fled to meet his other daughter, was his servant in the stocks; from whence he may easily conjecture what reception he is to meet with:

Death on my state! Wherefore

Should he sit here?

He adds immediately afterwards,

O me, my heart! my rising heart!--but down. By which single line the inexpressible anguish of his mind, and the dreadful conflict of opposite passions with which it is agitated, are more forcibly expressed than by the long and laboured speech, enumerating the causes of his anguish, that Rowe and other modern tragic writers would certainly have put into his mouth. But Nature, Sophocles, and Shakspeare, represent the feelings of the heart in a different manner; by a broken hint, a short exclamation, a word, or a look:

They mingle not, 'mid deep-felt sighs and groans,
Descriptions gay, or quaint comparisons,

No flow'ry far-fetch'd thoughts their scenes admit;
Ill suits conceit with passion, woe with wit.

Here passion prompts each short expressive speech;
Or silence paints what words can never reach.

J. W.

When Jocasta, in Sophocles, has discovered that Edipus was the murderer of her husband, she immediately leaves the stage; but in Corneille and Dryden she continues on it during a whole scene, to bewail her destiny in set speeches. I should be guilty of insensibility and injustice, if I did not take this occasion to acknowledge, that I have been more moved and delighted by hearing this single line spoken by the only actor of the age who understands and relishes these little touches of nature, and therefore the only one qualified to personate this most difficult character of Lear, than by the most pompous speeches in Cato or Tamerlane."

▾ That Garrick, who is here alluded to, had great merit in giving to his representation of Lear a more natural, touching, and impassioned tone than had previously been effected, tradition has uniformly asserted; nor was the acting of Mr. Kemble in this part perhaps less entitled to praise; but, notwithstanding the efforts of these accomplished performers, I cannot but be of opinion with Mr. Lamb, where, speaking of the almost insuperable difficulty of justly representing this sublimely impassioned character, he tells us, in language which may be said to form a most magnificent pieture of the afflicted monarch, that "they (the actors) might more easily propose to personate the Satan 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

In the next scene, the old king appears in a very distressful situation. He informs Regan, whom he believes to be still actuated by filial tenderness, of the cruelties he had suffered from her sister Gonerill in very pathetic terms:

Beloved Regan,

Thy sister's naught.--O Regan! she hath tied
Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture, here.
I scarce can speak to thee-thou❜lt not believe,
With how deprav'd a quality-O Regan!

It is a stroke of wonderful art in the poet to represent him incapable of specifying the particular ill usage he has received, and breaking off thus abruptly, as if his voice was choked by tenderness and resentment.

When Regan counsels him to ask her sister for

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 these things ""-Lamb's Works, vol. 2, p. 25.

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