her hand would want half her love, half of her care and duty; she
should never marry like her sisters, to love her father all.

Cordelia, who in earnest loved her old father even almost as
extravagantly as her sisters pretended to do, would have plainly told
him so at any other time, in more daughter-like and loving terms, and
without these qualifications, which did indeed sound a little
ungracious; but after the crafty flattering speeches of her sisters,
which she had seen drawn such extravagant rewards, she thought the
handsomest thing she could do was to love and be silent. This put her
affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and showed that she loved,
but not for gain; and that her professions, the less ostentatious they
were, had so much the more of truth and sincerity than her sisters'.

This plainness of speech, which Lear called pride, so enraged the old
monarch--who in his best of times always showed much of spleen and
rashness, and in whom the dotage incident to old age had so clouded over
his reason, that he could not discern truth from flattery, nor a gay
painted speech from words that came from the heart--that in a fury of
resentment he retracted the third part of his kingdom which yet
remained, and which he had reserved for Cordelia, and gave it away from
her, sharing it equally between her two sisters and their husbands, the
Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; whom he now called to him, and in presence
of all his courtiers bestowing a coronet between them, invested them
jointly with all the power, revenue, and execution of government, only
retaining to himself the name of king; all the rest of royalty he
resigned; with this reservation, that himself, with a hundred knights
for his attendants, was to be maintained by monthly course in each of
his daughters' palaces in turn.

So preposterous a disposal of his kingdom, so little guided by reason,
and so much by passion, filled all his courtiers with astonishment and
sorrow; but none of them had the courage to interpose between this
incensed king and his wrath, except the Earl of Kent, who was beginning
to speak a good word for Cordelia, when the passionate Lear on pain of
death commanded him to desist; but the good Kent was not so to be
repelled. He had been ever loyal to Lear, whom he had honoured as a
king, loved as a father, followed as a master; and he had never esteemed
his life further than as a pawn to wage against his royal master's
enemies, nor f