Lear can best be realised by a comparison of his handling with that of Nahum Tate, a later playwright whose version of the play was used on the stage in preference to that of Shakespeare up to quite recent times. This Nahum Tate. depicts Lear merely as a "ranting, roaring, choleric king" who shows none of those subtle gradations of character which delight us in the artistic setting of Shakespeare. With the latter Lear is a leviathan character in whose "nostrils," to quote Lamb's famous criticism, Tate put his hook for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily". Garrick might act the choleric King of Nahum Tate, but no dramatic skill could adequately represent the mad old king of Shakespeare.

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Difficult indeed would it be to depict fittingly the strange species of dementia of which Shakespeare sketches the various stages with the skill of an expert in mental diseases.

All his life Lear has been unable to control his impetuous passions; gradually they have infected his mind with disease, exercise complete sway over him through "long-ingrafted condition"; finally, played upon and exasperated by the cruelty and indifference of his daughters, these same passions cause his utter ruin.

All the while the tragedian skilfully lays stress upon the morbid anticipations of coming madness which depress the aged king and are mingled with futile but passionate vows of revenge :

No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall-I will do such things,-
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep:
No, I'll not weep:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or e'er I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

So after having passed through the different phases of

insanity we find him at last "a very foolish fond old man,” but with the natural goodness of his heart still almost undiminished, glad to die with his sanity well-nigh restored and in the company of the daughter upon whose "kind nursery" he is enabled at the last to "set his rest".

Shakespeare's character of King Lear is more, however, than a masterly analysis of the degrees of mental insanity and a vivid illustration of the old Latin proverb, quem deus perdere vult, prius dementat. It is a terribly true conception of the effects of unbridled passions upon a man, and it enables Shakespeare to prove to us that "the greatest strength of genius lies in describing the strongest passions".

(b) Cordelia. Unlike a great number of Shakespeare's heroines, the written part assigned to Cordelia is a very small one. Forty-three lines in the first act, sixty-one in the fourth and five in the fifth make up the whole of her contribution in words. She is indeed famous not for speech but for action: as she says herself :

If for I want that glib and oily art,

To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend,

I'll do 't before I speak.

And again, in reply to Lear's urgent request for her to tell the extent of her filial love, she can only answer:—

Nothing, my lord,

Unhappy that I am! I cannot heave

My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.

But though she does not "fill our minds with such talk,” in action she is of all Shakespeare's women the most graceful and tender. Of the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia, says Schlegel, pronounced in so few words I shall not venture to speak ".

The intense tragic pathos of Lear finds its counterpart in the trilogies of the old Greek dramatists, when an inevitable Até or Nemesis gradually involves a whole family in ruin,

and nowhere do we find two characters more closely parallel than the Antigone of Sophocles and the Cordelia of Shakespeare.

These two characters "as practical conceptions," says Mrs. Jameson, "rest on the same basis, devoted filial affection, fraternal also in the case of the Greek heroine". Cordelia might well have echoed the words of her great prototype:-Alas! I only wish I might have died

With my poor father:

Wherefore should I ask

For longer life?

Oh, I was fond of misery with him:

E'en what was most unlovely grew beloved
When he was with me

Worn as thou wert with age, to me thou still
Wert dear and shall be ever.

But in the case of Antigone, though the portrait of her is painted by a master hand, there is something of austerity and coldness which prevents it appealing to our hearts and sympathies like the warm and holy womanhood personified in Cordelia and affecting us "in a manner which we feel rather than perceive".

Antigone impresses us by the dignity and elaborate grandeur of her sentiments, Cordelia evokes our tears by the simple beauty of her character.

As types of that devotion to family so very strongly marked among ancient peoples the two women will always remain imperishable; the epitaph which Antigone composed for herself and her brother Polynices might well have been placed upon the tomb of Lear and Cordelia

Loving and beloved,

We'll rest together.

(c) Goneril and Regan.-The love we feel for the nobility of Cordelia is enhanced by the sharp contrast produced by the unnatural conduct of Goneril and Regan, "tigers not daughters," of whom Lear says in righteous indignation:

"by the marks of sov'reignty, of knowledge, and of reason, I should be false persuaded I had daughters". Monsters though they both be in effect there is a distinct difference between the two in character and method. Goneril is more masculine, more unflinching, more brazen in villainy, and more determined in execution. She does not, like her sister, essay to conceal her iron hand beneath a velvet glove.

Regan is dominated completely by Goneril and frequently consults her for instructions (Act iv. Sc. 2, 11. 86, 90); when Goneril is for grappling with dangers at once Regan is for putting off the evil day (Act i. Sc. 1, ll. 284, 285).

Again, when Regan has or assumes moral scruples Goneril shows none for instance, when Lear goes out to face the storm upon the heath, Regan seeks to excuse her inhospitality to her parent by saying:

This house is little: the old man and his people
Cannot be well bestowed.

But Goneril bluntly retorts :

'Tis his own blame; hath put himself from rest,
And must needs taste his folly.

It is indeed difficult to know which to execrate the morethe callous cruelty of Goneril or the less determined but the more vicious attacks of Regan; the one persecutes in order to satisfy her ambition, the other to glut an animal love of inflicting suffering. In both cases "their deliberate hypocrisy adds the last finishing touch to the odiousness of their characters".

(d) Edgar and Edmund.-Just as the virtue of Cordelia makes the wickedness of her sisters more repulsive, so the noble character of Edgar makes to stand out in à more unenviable light the bold villainy of Edmund."

Edgar is a simply but powerfully drawn picture of a good knight sans peur et sans reproche, who, though ill-treated by his father Gloucester owing to the false machinations of

Edmund, could still faithfully adhere to his blind and unfortunate parent in his adversity, and in the miserable guise of Tom o' Bedlam.

Became his guide,

Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair. One could indeed almost wish that Shakespeare's Edgar had, like the Edgar of Nahum Tate, married Cordelia and lived happy ever after. Edmund ranks of course as the villain of the piece, at least as far as the male characters are concerned, a villain, however, of the bold swash-buckling class who does not attempt to hide his depravity under a cloak of hypocrisy : if he shows the cunning of an Iago, he also proves himself as bold as Falconbridge in King John, and thus draws from us something of grudging appreciation.

Beginning life with a bar sinister on his escutcheon, reared in obscurity, pointed out by his father as a bastard whom he has often blushed to acknowledge, he has become utterly reckless and counts himself an outcast from society. Hazlitt points out that when Gloucester accounts for the wickedness of Edgar (in making designs against his father's life) by the late eclipses of the sun and moon, Edmund smiles at the idea after his father's departure. He sneers at “the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars". It is by this very frankness with which "he writes himself down plain villain," that he mitigates greatly the repugnance that would otherwise be naturally felt by us towards him.

(e) Other Characters.-Among the remaining dramatis persona which call for notice, Albany spoils his good qualities by vacillation and inert submission to his wife Goneril, Gloucester though well meaning is too weak and nerveless to endure adversity, Cornwall shows himself a cruel savage, and Kent a loyal devoted subject whose good advice Lear would have done well to heed.