reasoning powers together, give way, one after another, with the phrensy of rage and grief. Then it is that we find, what in life may sometimes be seen, the intellectual energies grow stronger in calamity, and especially under wrong. An awful eloquence belongs to unmerited suffering. Thoughts burst out more profound than Lear in his prosperous hour could ever have conceived; inconsequent for such is the condition of madness-but, in themselves, fragments of coherent truth, the reason of the unreasonable mind."

It is when Lear is brought lowest that his good angel, the lost Cordelia, comes back to minister to him. We first hear of her in that exquisite description-one of the most graphic that Shakspeare ever drew-of her receiving the letters narrating her father's affliction:

"She took them, read them in my presence;
And now and then an ample tear trill'd down
Her delicate cheek; it seem'd she was a queen
Over her passion; who, most rebel-like,

Sought to be king o'er her.

Kent. 0, then it moved her?

Gent. Not to a rage; patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like a better day. Those happy smiles
That play'd on her ripe lip, seem'd not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd. In brief, sorrow
Would be a rarity most beloved, if all

Could so become it.

Kent. Made she no verbal question?

Gent. Faith, once or twice, she heaved the name of father

Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart;

Cried, Sisters! sisters!-Shame of ladies! sisters!

Kent! father! sisters! What? i' the storm? i' the night?
Let pity not be believed!'-There she shook

The holy water from her heavenly eyes,

And clamour moisten'd: then away she started,

To deal with grief alone."

The turbulence of the tragedy now gives place to gentler emotions. After a tempest so ruinous, there break forth some rays of the pathetic light of sunset. A softer radiance is floating round Cordelia.

But Lear must not pass away from life in the darkness of insanity. The restoration of his mind is as inimitable as its aberration. When he awakes from his sleep of madness he is all gentleness-regenerate by the discipline of adversity and of his phrensy. One of the most beautiful dramatic passages ever composed is that where Cordelia is watching over her sleeping father-praying over him“0 you kind gods,

Cure this great breach in his abused nature.

The untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up
Of this child-changed father."

The voice that, in happy days gone by, used to be music in his ears, is heard once more; and it is no wonder that, in his waking bewilderment, Lear answers her question whether he knows her

"You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?"

The shrill accents of Goneril and Regan had been the horrid sounds he listened to, and then the stormy noises of an angry sky; but now the melody of Cordelia's voice carries him into the world of spirits. When his daughter beseeches his blessing, his confused recollections begin to shape themselves:

"Pray, do not mock me:

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward; and, to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have,
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night: Do not laugh at me;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child, Cordelia."

That despotic parental fondness which was only tributary to his pride and selfishness is purified, and now Lear looks upon his daughter with a true affection—that happy consciousness so feelingly expressed by the great poet of our times the consciousness that

"There are spun

Around the heart such tender ties

That our own children to our eyes

Are dearer than the sun."*

The happy hours of this recognition are only short moments in the tragedy. The gloom quickly gathers over it. The destiny of the drama demands its tragic ending; something different from a continuance of life with all the ills it is exposed to. There must be no tampering with the solemnities of its close. "Fourscore and upward"

why should Lear linger any longer on the earth?

"Would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer?"

Who

And Cordelia-the earth was too stormy and too wicked a place for one so pure and gentle to dwell upon. Besides, the law of a tragedy so lofty as this-so sublime

* Wordsworth's Ruth. Works, p. 139.

and solemn in its morality-required that she should be not only ministrant to her erring father, but a propitiatory sacrifice. Her last duty was to him; and the pity of it is, that the poor heart-broken old man could not have been spared that last agony of carrying in his arms his dead daughter.

But compare Lear at the beginning of the drama-selfish, irritable, foolish, petulant, despotic, and unnatural— with Lear at the close of it. The chastened spirit—the gentleness of his heart-breaking as he drooped to death over the dead body of his darling Cordelia, and surely we are taught that- "There is in mournful thoughts a power to virtue friendly."

LECTURE II.*

Macbeth.

WHEN I last had the pleasure of meeting you, we were engaged in the consideration of a tragedy in which the chief agency employed was the emotion of pity. It was surely most piteous to contemplate, first, the perversion of Lear's moral nature, and then the accumulation of his agonies; and most piteous of all was it to contemplate the sad sacrifice of the innocent Cordelia. Yet, all this was accompanied with a reconciling principle, found in the reflection that the painful series of afflictions was a process of moral purification. Lear's heart was restored, and Cordelia's filial piety became more beautiful with the glory of martyrdom.

The tragedy of Macbeth is, in these respects, very different. The chastening of the passions, which tragedy is designed to accomplish, is now to be effected by the instrumentality, not of pity, but of terror-terror in the imaginative presence of wicked temptations and of a fearful career of guilt. In the last lecture, I sought to show you how Shakspeare carried Lear along his stormy pil

*December 13th, 1842.