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Lear & the two Children, we visited the old position of Fort Washington and afterwards dined on a dinner provided by Mr. Mariner." Launchings, barbecues, clambakes, and turtle dinners were other forms of social dissipations. A distinct weakness was dancing. When on the frontier he sighed, "the hours at present are melancholy dull.
Lear during Washington's residence at Mount Vernon, in the autumn of 1790, he frequently refers to the children under Mrs. Washington's care, who composed a part of the family. In a letter, dated October 3d, he requests Mr. Lear to make inquiries respecting the schools in Philadelphia, with a view to placing Washington Custis, Mrs. Washington's grandson, at the best.
I contrasted his punctuality, when he came to see "King Lear," with the unpunctuality of Lord Randolph Churchill, who came to see the play the very next night with a party of men friends and arrived when the first act was over. Lord Randolph was, all the same, a great admirer of Henry Irving.
There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of the weaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both for the king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk will show. No. I. was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form three volumes of 500 pages each.
Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear as a little girl is affected by the story of poor Red Riding-hood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England.
But "King Lear," though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and half-religious effect than, say, "Hamlet," yet as a general impression is the more mystical of the two plays. The element of madness, which in "Hamlet" hangs in the background like a storm-cloud ready to break, in "King Lear" rages; and it is the use of this which lends its amazing psychical power to the play.
Such is the moral that exhales from plays like 'Lear', 'Hamlet', and 'Macbeth'. But such is not the moral to be found in the great bulk of contemporary Drama. The moral of the average play is now, and probably has always been, the triumph at all costs of a supposed immediate ethical good over a supposed immediate ethical evil.
Happily, such weakness as this is not characteristic of the English people; but "they are well kept that God keeps," and perhaps it would not be wise to cramp the hand of relief too much at a time like this, to a people who have been, and will be yet, the hope and glory of the land. "Poor Tom's a-cold! Who gives anything to poor Tom?" King Lear.
Fourth Period, Late Experiment. CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO SOURCE. In history, legend, and story, Shakespeare found the material for nearly all his dramas; and so they are often divided into three classes, called historical plays, like Richard III and Henry V; legendary or partly historical plays, like Macbeth, King Lear, and Julius Cæsar; and fictional plays, like Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice.
His "Lear" is in the Boston Athenæum; his "Hamlet and Ophelia" is in the Longworth collection in Cincinnati; "Christ Healing the Sick" is in the Pennsylvania Hospital; and the "Rejected Christ" is or was owned by Mr. Harrison, of Philadelphia.
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