ss leaning for all pleasure on another's
breast;--the craving after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness,
frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its
claims;--the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less
accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest
contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate
Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the
inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive
right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;--these facts,
these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is
founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found
implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know
that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's
rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most
unexpectedly baffled and disappointed.

It may here be worthy of notice, that _Lear_ is the only serious
performance of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are
derived from the assumption of a gross improbability; whereas Beaumont and
Fletcher's tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the
way accident or exception to the general experience of mankind. But
observe the matchless judgment of our Shakespeare. First, improbable as
the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted
in the popular faith,--a thing taken for granted already, and consequently
without any of the effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the
canvass for the characters and passions,--a mere occasion for,--and not, in
the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause,
and _sine qua non_ of,--the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of
this play have been lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father
had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of
two daughters to disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more
dear to him;--and all the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest
undiminished, and be perfectly intelligible.

The accidental is nowhere the groundwork of the passions, but that which
is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and
native to the heart of man,--parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the
genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntne