se those moral obligations which exist
only by convention,--by 'custom' or 'the curiosity of nations.'[170]
Practically, his attitude is that of a professional criminal. 'You tell
me I do not belong to you,' he seems to say to society: 'very well: I
will make my way into your treasure-house if I can. And if I have to
take life in doing so, that is your affair.' How far he is serious in
this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of bastardy, how far
his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for his meditated
villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is not entirely
in earnest.

As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will,
it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his
failure without showing personal animosity. But he does more. He admits
the truth of Edgar's words about the justice of the gods, and applies
them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to
fortune's wheel rather than to the gods may be significant). He shows
too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story
of his father's death, and at last 'pants for life' in the effort to do
'some good' by saving Lear and Cordelia. There is something pathetic
here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to
Edgar, and had been at home during those 'nine years' when he was 'out,'
he might have been a very different man. But perhaps his words,

Some good I mean to do,
_Despite of mine own nature_,

suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact,
commented on by Kent in the case of the three daughters of Lear, of an
immense original difference between children of one father. Stranger
than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the
pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the
women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see. Perhaps, as
we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even
after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy
reflections on his past. When he murmurs, 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' one
is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject
the love of his father and half-brother. The passage is one of several
in Shakespeare's plays where it strikes us that he is recording some
fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had
seemed to