So ends 'King Lear,' the most stupendous of the Shakspearian dramas; and Kent, the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master!—to the suffusing of many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated, as one that
——served not for gain,
Or follow'd out of form,
are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching, strokes in Shakspeare.
Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pith and point of an argument, the amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is delivered briefly, and, as it were, parenthetically; as in those few but pregnant words, in which the man in the old 'Nut-brown Maid' rather intimates than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman:—
Now understand, to Westmorland,
Which is my heritage,
I will you bring, and with a ring,
By way of marriage,
I will you take, and Lady make.
Turn we to the version of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat. Prior—in his own way unequalled, and a poet now-a-days too much neglected—"In me," quoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma—with a flourish and an attitude, as we may conceive:—
In me behold the potent Edgar's heir,
Illustrious Earl! him terrible in war,
Let Loire confess.
And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more, presents the Lady with a full and true enumeration of his Papa's rent-roll in the fat soil by Deva.
But of all parentheses, (not to quit the topic too suddenly,) commend me to that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of Fair Rosamund:—
When good King Henry ruled this land,
The second of that name,