my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but
fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind
to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank
astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the
moment he restrains himself and asks,

But goes thy heart with this?

Imagine Imogen's reply! But Cordelia answers,

Ay, good my lord.

_Lear._ So young, and so untender?

_Cor._ So young, my lord, and true.

Yes, 'heavenly true.' But truth is not the only good in the world, nor
is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation. The matter here was
to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if truth
_were_ the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not
to tell it. And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than truth
about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to
give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely never
was a more unhappy speech.

When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother's life, her
horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the
justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that
she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would
actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her
for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,

Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]

are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
language to her sisters in the first scene--language perfectly just, but
little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father--and again in
the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
in, prisoners, to the enemy