nto the monstrous: yet even as much as this, at least in
all cases but one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone would it
be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile
than it was devilish. Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-
flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted
goodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all
that the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her
imperious and dauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes of
her "milk-livered" and "moral fool" the coming banners of France about
the "plumed helm" of his slayer.

On the other side, Kent is the exception which answers to Regan on this.
Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of
intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brand as indiscretion
and dotage in their father, which redeems her from the charge of
perfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for the sense
of divine irritation. Godlike though they be, their very godhead is
human and feminine; and only therefore credible, and only therefore
adorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo, have power to stir and
embitter the sweetness of their blood. But for the contrast and even the
contact of antagonists as abominable as these, the gold of their spirit
would be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet
of their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce
among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so
equally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and make
bearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwise
could either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attribute
and epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth of human hell is
so foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as
foils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven
should be no less immaculate and immeasurable.

It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb,
to enlarge upon the evidence given in _King Lear_ of a sympathy with the
mass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tender
than Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and even
in respectable quarters the murmur is not quite duly extinct which would
charge on Shakespeare a certain share