for example in those words, already quoted, which
first show that his mind has actually given way:

Hast thou given all
To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?[161]

But it is remarkable that what we have here is only, in an exaggerated
and perverted form, the very same action of imagination that, just
before the breakdown of reason, produced those sublime appeals:

O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause;

and:

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!

Shakespeare, long before this, in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, had
noticed the resemblance between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;
and the partial truth that genius is allied to insanity was quite
familiar to him. But he presents here the supplementary half-truth that
insanity is allied to genius.

He does not, however, put into the mouth of the insane Lear any such
sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys
the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it
stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had
already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and
however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the
insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar
represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions,
flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so
long been deceived and will never be deceived again:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the
worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no
perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the
thing itself.

Lear regards the beggar therefore with reverence and delight, as a
person who is in the secret of things, and he longs to question h