. i. 67 ff.). Gloster again,
thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,

but I shall see
The winged vengeance overtake such children.

The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and
Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.
One cries,

I'll never care what wickedness I do,
If this man come to good;

and another,

if she live long,
And in the end meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.

Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,

This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge;

and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,

This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
Touches us not with pity.

Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us,

and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from _King Lear_
an impression which is at least as near of kin to the _Divine Comedy_ as
to _Othello_.

3

For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice
and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something,
it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are
the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme
in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with
much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show thing