the phase of infirmity displaying itself at this moment. Any other dramatist than Shakespeare would have represented the poor old king quite restored to the balance and control of his faculties. The complete efficiency of filial love would have been made to triumph over the laws of mental function.
But
Shakespeare has represented the exact degree of improvement which was probable under the circumstances, namely, resto ration from the intellectual mania which resulted from the
combined influence of physical and moral shock, with per sistence of the emotional excitement and disturbance which is
the incurable and unalterable result of passion exaggerated by long habitude and by the malign influence of extreme age. The last scene, in which Lear's tough heart at length breaks over the murdered body of his dear child, is one of
those masterpieces of tragic art, before which we are disposed to stand silent in awed admiration. The indurated sympathies of science, however, may examine even the death scene. The first thing to remark is, that there is no insanity in it, that Lear might have spoken and acted thus if his mind had never wandered. He has found Edmund's mercenary murderer hanging Cordelia, so as “to lay the blame upon her own despair.” He kills the slave, and with the last remnant of strength carries the dear body into the midst of that heart struck conclave, where the sisters, who “desperately are dead,” already lie. At first he is under the excitement of mental agony, expressing itself in the wild wail: “Howl, howl, howl' O, you are men of stones; Had I your tongues and eyes I'd use them so, That heaven's vault should crack:-She's gone for ever !” Then follows the intense cruel anxiety of false hope, followed
by quick resolve and reasonable action : the demand for the looking glass : the trial of the feather, to ascertain if any faint imperceptible breath remains. Then, the sustaining but fatal excitement over, leaden grief settles upon the heart, and
