in whom, according to his
expression, are "interess'd the vines of France and the milk of
Burgundy," that is, whose hand is being claimed by the King of France
and the Duke of Burgundy,--he asks Cordelia how she loves him. Cordelia,
who personifies all the virtues, as the eldest two all the vices, says,
quite out of place, as if on purpose to irritate her father, that altho
she loves and honors him, and is grateful to him, yet if she marries,
all her love will not belong to her father, but she will also love her
husband.

Hearing these words, the King loses his temper, and curses this favorite
daughter with the most dreadful and strange maledictions, saying, for
instance, that he will henceforth love his daughter as little as he
loves the man who devours his own children.

"The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved.
As thou, my sometime daughter."

The courtier, Kent, defends Cordelia, and desiring to appease the King,
rebukes him for his injustice, and says reasonable things about the evil
of flattery. Lear, unmoved by Kent, banishes him under pain of death,
and calling to him Cordelia's two suitors, the Duke of Burgundy and the
King of France, proposes to them in turn to take Cordelia without dowry.
The Duke of Burgundy frankly says that without dowry he will not take
Cordelia, but the King of France takes her without dowry and leads her
away. After this, the elder sisters, there and then entering into
conversation, prepare to injure their father who had endowed them. Thus
ends the first scene.

Not to mention the pompous, characterless language of King Lear, the
same in which all Shakespeare's Kings speak, the reader, or spectator,
can not conceive that a King, however old and stupid he may be, could
believe the words of the vicious daughters, with whom he had passed his
whole life, and not believe his favorite daughter, but curse and banish
her; and therefore the spectator, or reader, can not share the feelings
of the persons participating in this unnatural scene.

The second scene opens with Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son,
soliloquizing on the injustice of men, who concede rights and respect to
the legitimate son, but deprive the illegitimate son of them, and he
determines to ruin Edgar, and to usurp his place. For this purpose, he
forges a letter to himself