st the contamination of brown sugar, while they are
posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the
sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the
compilable mutton hash--she not yet decidedly declaring for
either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.

* * * * *

So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the
stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his
daughters on a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is
painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and
relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of
Lear ever produced on me. But the Lear of Shakespeare
cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate
to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any
actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily
propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or
one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of
Lear is not in corporal dimension but in intellectual: the
explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they
are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea,
his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is
laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too
insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects
it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and
weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see
not Lear, but we are Lear--we are in his mind, we are
sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we
discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized
from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers,
as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the
corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones
to do with that sublime identification of his age with that
of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them
for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds
them that "they themselves are old"? What gesture shall we
appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do
with such things?

From the olden time
Of Authorship thy Patent shou