To speak, and purpose not; since what I well sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, intend,

Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's | human feelings, a father's concentrated violent professions, whilst the inveterate love;-all these traces of what Shakspere habits of sovereignty convert the wish into only could effect, are utterly destroyed by the claim and positive right, and an incompliance stage conception of Lear, such as has been with it into crime and treason;-these facts, endured amongst us for more than a century. these passions, these moral verities, on which When the "showmen" banished the Fool, the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared they rendered it impossible that the original for, and will to the retrospect be found nature of Lear should be understood. It is implied, in the first four or five lines of the the Fool who interprets to us the old man's play." They are implied, certainly, but the sensitive tenderness lying at the bottom of character which they make up is not described his impatience. He cannot bear to hear that by Shakspere. When Regan and Goneril "the Fool hath much pined away.”—“ No speak slightingly of their father, immediately more of that, I have noted it well." From after he has been lavishing his kingdom the Fool, Lear can bear to hear truth; his upon them, it is not the object of the poet jealous pride is not alarmed: he indeed calls to make us understand Lear, but to make us him "a pestilent gall," "a bitter fool;" understand Regan and Goneril. This, again, but the was Shakspere's art:-Tate, the representative of the vulgar notion of art, must have a defined character-something positive, something generic-a bad man, a good mana mild man, a passionate man—a good son, a cruel son. Upon this principle the Lear of Tate is the choleric king. Because Goneril characteristically speaks of "the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them," Gloster, in Tate, is made to say of Lear,

"Yet has his temper ever been unfix'd, Chol'ric and sudden;"

and, as if this were not enough to disturb an audience in the proper comprehension of the real Lear, we must have Cordelia call him "the choleric king," and, last of all, Lear himself must exclaim, in the trial-scene, "'t is said that I am choleric." And now, then, that we have got a choleric king-a simple, unmixed, ranting, roaring, choleric king, he is in a fit condition to be stirred up by "the showmen of the scene." Charles Lamb would be immortal as a critic if he had only written these words:"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." All the wonderful gradations of his character are utterly destroyed;—all the thin partitions which separate passion from wildness, and wildness from insanity, and insanity from a partial restoration to the most intense of

"Poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man," in the depths of his misery, having scarcely anything in the world to love but the Fool, thus clings to him :

"My wits begin to turnCome on, my boy: How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself.-Where is this straw, my fellow?

The art of our necessities is strange,

That can make vile things precious. Come,

The

And all this is gone in the stage Lear.
"universal, ideal, and sublime" comedy, of
which the Fool is the principal exponent,
would have been incomprehensible to the
Augustan age. We are quite sure that Tate
would have got rid of the assumed madness
of Edgar, if he had not found it convenient
for the purpose of tacking a love-scene to it.
As it is, he has brought the mad Tom and
the mad king into juxtaposition. We do
not suspect Tate of comprehending the
metaphysical principle upon which Shakspere
worked, and which Coleridge has so well
expounded:
66
:- Edgar's assumed madness
serves the great purpose of taking off part of
the shock which would otherwise be caused
by the true madness of Lear, and further
displays the profound difference between the

It agrees

two. In every attempt at representing | consecration of Lear's madness.
madness throughout the whole range of dra-
matic literature, with the single exception of
Lear, it is mere light-headedness, as especially
in Otway. In Edgar's ravings, Shakspere
all the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a
practical end in view; in Lear's there is
only the brooding of the one anguish, an
eddy without progression." Tate has left us
this contrast; but he has taken away the
Fool, which completes the wonderful power
of the third act of Shakspere's 'Lear.' The
Fool, as well as Edgar, takes off part of the
shock which would otherwise be caused by
the madness of Lear, whilst he yet contributes
to the completeness of that moral chaos
which Shakspere has represented—“ all ex-
ternal nature in a storm, all moral nature
convulsed." A writer of very rare depth
and discrimination has thus described these
scenes of which Edgar and the Fool make
up such important accessories:-
:- "The two
characters, father and king, so high to our
imagination and love, blended in the reverend
image of Lear-both in their destitution, yet
both in their height of greatness-the spirit
blighted, and yet undepressed-the wits gone,
and yet the moral wisdom of a good heart
left unstained, almost unobscured-the wild
raging of the elements, joined with human
outrage and violence to persecute the helpless,
unresisting, almost unoffending sufferer-
and he himself, in the midst of all imaginable
misery and desolation, descanting upon
himself, on the whirlwinds that drive around
him, and then turning in tenderness to some
of the wild motley associations of sufferers
among whom he stands-all this is not like
what has been seen on any stage, perhaps in
any reality; but it has made a world to our
imagination about one single imaginary
individual, such as draws the reverence and
sympathy which would seem to belong
properly only to living men. It is like the
remembrance of some wild perturbed scene
of real life. Everything is perfectly woful in
this world of woe. The very assumed madness
of Edgar, which, if the story of Edgar stood
alone, would be insufferable, and would
utterly degrade him to us, seems, associated
as he is with Lear, to come within the

with all that is brought together;—the night the storms-the houselessness-Gloster with his eyes put out-the Fool-the semblance of a madman, and Lear in his madness,-are all bound together by a strange kind of sympathy, confusion in the elements of nature, of human society and the human soul! Throughout all the play is there not sublimity felt amidst the continual presence of all kinds of disorder and confusion in the natural and moral world; - a continual consciousness of eternal order, law, and good? This it is that so exalts it in our eyes."*

The love-scene between Edgar and Cordelia, in the first scene of the first act of Tate's 'Lear,' was an assurance, under the hand and seal of Tate, that the play would end happily. He might be constrained, in the impossibility of wholly destroying Shakspere, to exhibit to us some of the most terrific conflicts of human passion, and the most striking displays of human suffering. He could not utterly conceal the terrible workings of the mind of Lear, which had been laid bare by the "explosions of his passion." But he takes care to let it be understood that there is nothing real in this; that all will be right in the end; that, though the flames rage, the house is insured; that a wedding and a dance will terminate the play much better than the "dead march" of Shakspere. "Cordelia," says Dr. Johnson, "from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor."

This was a bold or a lazy avowal in Johnson; for Aristotle describes the popular admiration of the tragedy which ends happily for the good characters, and fatally for the bad, as a result of the "weakness of the spectators ;" and though Johnson vigorously attacked Aristotle's Unities-or rather the *Blackwood s Mag.,' vol. v.

†Treatise on Poetry'-Twining's Translation.