"This I imagine to be the course of the action, and through this the horrors of the scene become somewhat softened. The poet, to be sure, trusted much to the strong minds of his friends, who would be too much affected by the fearfulness of the entire representation of this tragedy to be interrupted by single events, bloody as they were; or, through them, to be frightened back from their conception of the whole."

"Flibbertigibet, of mopping and mowing; who since possesses chambermaids and waiting women.”—Act IV., Scene 1. Shakspere has made Edgar, in his feigned distraction, frequently allude to a vile imposture of some English Jesuits, at that time much the subject of conversation; the history of it having just then been composed with great art and vigour of style and composition by Dr. Harsenet, afterwards Archbishop of York, by order of the Privy Council, in a work entitled "A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to withdraw the Hearts of her Majesty's Subjects from their Allegiance, &c.: practised by Edmunds, alias Weston, a Jesuit, and divers Romish Priests, his wicked Associates:"printed 1603.

The imposture was in substance this:-While the Spaniards were preparing their Armada against England, the Jesuits here were busy at work to promote it, by making converts: one method they employed was to dispossess pretended demoniacs; by which artifice they made several hundred converts amongst the common people. The principal scene of this farce was laid in the family of Mr. Edward Peckham, a Roman Catholic, where Marwood, a servant of Anthony Babington (who was afterwards executed for treason), Trayford, an attendant upon Mr. Peckham, and Sarah and Friswood Williams, and Anne Smith (three chambermaids in that family), came into the priests' hands for cure. But the discipline of the patients was so long and severe, and the priests so elate and careless with their success, that the plot was discovered on the confession of the parties concerned, and the contrivers of it deservedly punished.

The five devils mentioned in the text are the names of five of those who were made to act in this farce, upon the chambermaids and waiting women; and they were generally so ridiculously nicknamed, that Harsenet has one chapter "on the strange names of their devils; lest (says he) meeting them otherwise by chance, you mistake them for the names of tapsters or jugglers."-WARBURTON.

"She that herself will sliver and disbranch

From her material sap, perforce must wither, And come to deadly use."-Act IV., Scene 2. Alluding to the use that witches and enchanters are said to make of withered branches in their charms. A fine insinuation in Albany that Goneril was ready for the most unnatural mischief; and a preparative of the poet to her plotting with the bastard against her husband's life.WARBURTON.

So in " MACBETH:"

"Slips of yew,

Slivered in the moon's eclipse."

"See thyself, devil!

Proper deformity seems not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman."-Act IV., Scene 2.

That is, "Diabolical qualities appear not so horrid in the devil, to whom they belong, as in woman, who unnaturally assumes them."

"This a good block?—

It were a delicate stratagem to shoe

A troop of horse with felt!"-Act IV., Scene 6. Upon the King's saying, "I will preach to thee," the poet seems to have meant him to pull off his hat, and keep

turning it and feeling it, in the attitude of one of the preachers of those times (whom I have seen represented in ancient prints) till the idea of felt, which the good hat or block was made of, raises the stratagem in his brain of shoeing a troop of horse with the same substance.

Dr. Johnson (with greater probability, as we think) proposes to read" a good flock," instead of "a good block."Flocks," he adds, "are wool moulded together. It is very common for madmen to catch an accidental hint, and strain it to the purpose predominant in their minds. Lear picks up a flock, and immediately thinks to surprise his enemies by a troop of horse shod with flocks or felt."

The "delicate stratagem" of so equipping horses, had, it appears from Lord Herbert's "LIFE OF HENRY VIII.," been rosorted to, in a tournament held at Lisle in 1513, in order to prevent the animals from slipping on a marble floor.

"Nay, come not near th' old man: keep out, che vor' ye." Act IV., Scene 6.

"Che vor' ye" means "I warn you." When our ancient writers have occasion to introduce a rustic, they commonly allot him the Somersetshire dialect. Golding, in his translation of the second book of Ovid's "METAMORPHOSES," makes Mercury, assuming the appearance of a clown, speak with the provinciality of Edgar.

"And take upon us the mystery of things,

As if we were God's spies."-Act V., Scene 3. That is, "as if we were angels, endowed with the power of prying into the original motives of action and the mysteries of conduct."-JOHNSON.

"Trust to thy single virtue.”—Act V., Scene 3. "Virtue" here signifies valour: a Roman sense of the word. Raleigh says, "The conquest of Palestine with singular virtue they achieved."

"Ask him his purposes: why he appears

Upon this call o' the trumpet."-Act V., Scene 3. This is according to the ceremonials of the trial by combat: -"The appellant and his procurator first come to the gate. The constable and marshal demand, by voice of herald, what he is and why he comes so arrayed."-Selden's "DUELLO."

"KENT. Is this the promised end?

EDG. Or image of that horror ?"-Act V., Scene 3. Kent, in contemplating the unexampled scene of exquisite affection which was then before him, and the unnatural attempt of Goneril and Regan against their father's life, recollects those passages of St. Mark's Gospel in which Christ foretels to his disciples the end of the world and hence his question, "Is this the promised end of all things, which has been foretold to us ?" to which Edgar adds, "or only a representation or resemblance of that horror!" So Macbeth, when he calls upon Banquo, Malcolm, &c., to view Duncan murdered, says,

"Up, up, and see

The great doom's image."

There is an allusion to the same passage of Scripture in a speech of Gloster's, in the second scene of the first act.MASON.

"The weight of this sad time we must obey."
Act V., Scene 3.

This speech, from the authority of the old quarto, is rightly placed to Albany. In the edition by the players it is given to Edgar, by whom, I doubt not, it was of custom spoken; and the case was this: he who played Edgar, being a more favourite actor than he who performed Albany,

in spite of decorum it was thought proper he should have the last word.-THEOBALD.

Or this noble tragedy, one of the first productions of the noblest of poets, it is scarcely possible to express our admiration in adequate terms. Whether considered as an effort of art or as a picture of the passions, it is entitled to the highest praise. The two portions of which the fable consists, involving the fate of Lear and his daughters and of Gloster and his sons, influence each other in so many points and are blended with such consummate skill, that whilst the imagination is delighted by diversity of circumstances, the judgment is equally gratified in viewing their mutual cooperation towards the final result; the coalescence being so intimate as not only to preserve the necessary unity of action, but to constitute one of the greatest beauties of the piece.

Such, indeed, is the interest excited by the structure and concatenation of the story, that the attention is not once suffered to flag. By a rapid succession of incidents, by sudden and overwhelming vicissitudes, by the most awful instances of misery and destitution, by the boldest contrariety of characters, are curiosity and anxiety kept progressively increasing, and with an impetus so strong as nearly to absorb every faculty of the mind and every feeling of the heart.

Victims of frailty, of calamity, or of vice, in an age remote and barbarous-the actors in this drama are brought forward with a strength of colouring which, had the scene been placed in a more civilised era, might have been justly deemed too dark and ferocious, but is not discordant with the earliest heathen age of Britain. The effect of this style of characterisation is felt occasionally throughout the entire play, but is particularly visible in the delineation of the vicious personages of the drama; the parts of Goneril, Regan, Edmund, and Cornwall, being loaded not only with ingratitude of the deepest dye, but with cruelty of the most savage and diabolical nature. They are the criminals, in fact, of an age when vice may be supposed to reign with lawless and gigantic power, and in which the extrusion of Gloster's eyes might be such an event as not unfrequently occurred.

Had this mode of casting his characters in the extreme applied to the remainder of the dramatis persona, we should have lost some of the finest lessons of humanity and wisdom that ever issued from the pen of an uninspired writer: but, with the exception of a few coarsenesses, which remind us of the barbarous period to which the story is referred, and of a few instances rather revolting to probability, but which could not be detached from the original marrative, the virtuous agents of the play exhibit the manners and the feelings of civilisation, and are of that mixed fabric which can alone display a just portraiture of the nature and composition of our species.

The characters of Cordelia and Edgar, it is true, approach nearly to perfection; but the filial virtues of the former are combined with such exquisite tenderness of heart, and those of the latter with such bitter humiliation and suffering, that grief, indignation, and pity are instantly excited. Very

striking representations are also given of the rough fidelity of Kent and of the hasty credulity of Gloster; but it is in delineating the passions, feelings, and afflictions of Lear that our poet has wrought up a picture of human misery which has never been surpassed and which agitates the soul with the most overpowering emotions of sympathy and compassion.

The conduct of the unhappy monarch having been founded merely on the impulses of sensibility, and not on any fixed principle or rule of action, no sooner has he discovered the baseness of those on whom he had relied, and the fatal mistake into which he had been hurried by the delusions of inordinate fondness and extravagant expectation, than he feels himself bereft of all consolation and resource. Those to whom he had given all, for whom he had stripped himself of dignity and honour, and on whom he had centred every hope of comfort and repose in his old age-his inhuman daughters-having not only treated him with utter coldness and contempt, but sought to deprive him of all the respectability and even of the very means of existencewhat, in a mind so constituted as Lear's, the sport of intense and ill-regulated feeling, and tortured by the reflection of having deserted the only child who loved him-what but madness could be expected as the result? It was, in fact, the necessary consequence of the reciprocal action of complicated distress and morbid sensibility: and, in describing the approach of this dreadful infliction, in tracing its progress, its height, and subsidence, our poet has displayed such an intimate knowledge of the workings of the human intellect, under all its aberrations, as would afford an admirable study for the inquirer into mental physiology.

He has also in this play, as in that of "HAMLET," finely discriminated between real and assumed insanity,-Edgar, amidst all the wild imagery which his imagination has accumulated never once touching on the true source of his misery; whilst Lear, on the contrary, finds it associated with every object and every thought, however distant or dissimilar. Not even the Orestes of Euripides, or the Clementina of Richardson, can, as pictures of disordered reason, be placed in competition with this of Lear. It may be pronounced, indeed, from its truth and completeness, beyond the reach of rivalry.-DRAKE'S "SHAKSPEARE AND HIS TIMES."

THE tragedy of "LEAR" is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakspere. There is, perhaps, no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking oppositions of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope. There is no scene which does not contribute to the aggravation of the distress or conduct of the action, and scarce a line which does not conduce to the progress of the scene. So powerful is the current of the poet's imagination that the mind which once ventures within it is hurried irresistibly along.-JOHNSON.