are gone; but trouble him not, he sleeps, and noble affec tion watches and hopes: “Kent. Oppress'd nature sleeps:— This rest might yet have balmed thy broken senses, Which, if convenience will not allow, Stand in hard cure.”
Hardly so, noble Kent. The mind's malady is too deep seated to be thus easily cured by nature's effort; nature's sweet restorer will scarcely balm the wounds which have so long festered. To use a surgical simile, there can be no union by first intention here; sleep may terminate the brief and sudden insanity of delirium, but not this.
If,
afterward, his “untuned and jarring senses” are actually restored by the sweet influence of sleep, it is not by the brief and insufficient sleep of exhaustion, but by that of skillful and solicitous medication; sleep, so long and pro found, that it is needful to disturb it; sleep, the crown
ing result of successful medical treatment, conducted in the spirit of love and sympathy, and whose final remedy hangs on the sweet lips of Cordelia. In mania, the broken sleep of mere exhaustion does but renew the strength of excite ment; but the profound sleep, resulting from skillful treat
ment, is often the happy cause of restoration. The intellectual and excited babbling of the Fool, and
the exaggerated absurdities of Edgar, are stated by Ulrici, and other critics, to exert a bad influence upon the king's
mind.
To persons unacquainted with the character of the
insane, this opinion must seem, at least, to be highly pro
bable, notwithstanding that the evidence of the drama itself is against it; for Lear is comparatively tranquil in conduct and language during the whole period of Edgar's mad companionship. It is only after the Fool has disappeared —gone to sleep at mid-day, as he says—and Edgar has left to be the guide of his blind father, that the king becomes
