Lear. O I have taken Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp; Expose thyself to FEEL what wretches FEEL, That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just.
Truly, these men would seem to have been taking lessons in the same school. But it is very seldom that two men in real life, of equal learning on any topic, coincide so exactly in their trains of thought, and in the niceties of their expression in discussing it. The emphasis is deep, indeed, when this author graves his meaning with such a repetition. But Regan's stern school-master is abroad in this play, enforcing the philosophic subtleties, bringing home to the senses the neglected lessons of nature; full of errands to 'wilful men,' charged with coarse lessons to those who will learn through the senses only great Nature's lore—that 'slave Heaven's ordinance—that will not SEE, because they do not FEEL.'
CHAPTER III.
THE KING AND THE BEGGAR.
Armado. Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?
Moth. The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but, I think, now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing, nor for the tune.
Armado. I will have the subject newly writ over, that I
may example my digression
by some mighty precedent.
Love's Labour's Lost.
But the king's philosophical studies are not yet completed; for he is in the hands of one who does not rely on general statements for his effects; one who is pertinaciously bent on exploring those subterranean social depths, that the king's prayer has just glanced at—who is determined to lay bare to the utmost, to carry the torch of his new science into the lowest recess of that wild, nameless mass of human neglect and misery, which the regal sympathy has embraced for him in the general; though not, indeed, without some niceties of detail, which shew that the eye of a true human pity has collected the terms in which he expresses it.
That vast, immeasurable mass of social misery, which has no learned speech, no tragic dialect—no, or 'it would bear such an emphasis,' that 'its phrase of sorrow might conjure the wandering stars, and bid them stand like wonder-wounded hearers'—that misery which must get a king's robe about it, ere, in the Poet's time, it could have an audience, must needs be produced here, ere all this play was played, in its own native and proper shape and costume, daring as the attempt might seem.
The author is not satisfied with the picturesque details of that misery which he has already given us, with its 'looped and windowed raggedness,' its 'houseless head,' its 'unfed sides'; it must be yet more palpably presented. It must be embodied and dramatically developed; it must be exhibited with its proper moral and intellectual accompaniments, too, before the philosophic requisitions of this design can be fulfilled.