ication of its origin and
occasion. From the first drawing up of the curtain Edmund has stood before
us in the united strength and beauty of earliest manhood. Our eyes have
been questioning him. Gifted as he is with high advantages of person, and
further endowed by nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic
will, even without any concurrence of circumstances and accident, pride
will necessarily be the sin that most easily besets him. But Edmund is
also the known and acknowledged son of the princely Gloster: he,
therefore, has both the germ of pride, and the conditions best fitted to
evolve and ripen it into a predominant feeling. Yet hitherto no reason
appears why it should be other than the not unusual pride of person,
talent, and birth,--a pride auxiliary, if not akin, to many virtues, and
the natural ally of honourable impulses. But alas! in his own presence his
own father takes shame to himself for the frank avowal that he is his
father,--he has "blushed so often to acknowledge him that he is now brazed
to it!" Edmund hears the circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most
degrading and licentious levity,--his mother described as a wanton by her
own paramour, and the remembrance of the animal sting, the low criminal
gratifications connected with her wantonness and prostituted beauty,
assigned as the reason why "the whoreson must be acknowledged!" This, and
the consciousness of its notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show
of respect is an effort of courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a
contrary feeling;--this is the ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall
into the wounds of pride,--the corrosive _virus_ which inoculates pride
with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred, and a lust for that power
which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his disc,--with
pangs of shame personally undeserved, and therefore felt as wrongs, and
with a blind ferment of vindictive working towards the occasions and
causes, especially towards a brother, whose stainless birth and lawful
honours were the constant remembrancers of his own debasement, and were
ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being unknown, or overlooked
and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent judgment, and provident
for the claims of the moral sense,--for that which, relatively to the
drama, is called poetic justice, and as the fittest means for reconciling
the feelings of the spectators to the horrors of Glos