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"You might take Lear's method," he suggested; "'And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon." For one instant, Phebe relaxed her severity. "Do you like Lear, too?" she asked. "Of course. What sensible person doesn't?"
The King's fool, notwithstanding the voluntary degradation which is implied in his situation, is, after Kent, Lear's most faithful associate, his wisest counsellor.
The phrase is not in Shakespeare, and Lear's wandering mind might as easily select "Persian" as any other absurdity. So it is throughout.
The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear's wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her husband's raiment, arrays himself in that husband's very garb to work upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern French realism, nothing even in Therese Raquin, that masterpiece of horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with this strange scene in Cymbeline.
She was silent and sullen, thinking always of the bad days that were coming to her. But, nevertheless, she was attentive to him, and during the time of his terrible necessity even good to him. It is so natural to women to be so, that I think even Regan would have nursed Lear had Lear's body become impotent instead of his mind.
Satisfactory festival stories are reported as exceedingly difficult to find. Atmosphere and festival spirit are often lacking in stories listed under Festivals and Holidays. Poetry and verses are repeated or read at many of the library story hours. Lear's nonsense rhymes and certain rhythmical story poems are especially enjoyed by the children.
Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving and shattering.
At this point in the tragedy, where it begins to transpire to Oedipus that he himself was the unwitting murderer and the incestuous wretch whose exile the oracle demands before dispelling the plague, here the divine genius of Sophokles introduces a chorus of general merriment, somewhat as Shakespeare uses the maundering fool as a foil to heighten King Lear's fate.
It suited Shakespeare's plot that the villain should be the bastard; that is all; and Lear's legitimate daughters Goneril and Regan are as base, as bad, and as cruelly ungrateful as Gloucester's illegitimate son. Shakespeare knew human nature too well, and handled it with too just and impartial a hand, to let the question of legitimacy influence him in one way or the other.
It was Miss Lear's custom to look much on this landscape from this window: had, in fact, been her habit for close upon forty years. And this evening, when the latch clicked at length, and her brother in his market-suit come slouching up the path between the parallels of garden-stuff, her eyes rested all the while upon the line of grey water above and beyond his respectable hat.
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