Do not laugh at me;
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
or to her answer—
And so I am, I am!
She has some cause to be angry with him, but her sisters none, he says; and she answers "No cause! no cause!" That, which is, perhaps, the finest passage in all literature, has not one metaphor, one trope, one "precious" phrase; but any old injured madman might speak just so. When poor, laughable, dissolute old Falstaff, dying, "babbles o' green fields"; when Lear at the last apostrophises his dead Cordelia—
Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never! * * *
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir! * * *
Do you see this? Look on her—look—her lips—
we can hardly bear to hear them. It is so much finer, because so much truer to nature than when those ingeniously poetical ladies, entreating the sepulture of their best beloved, urge that they are "rinsing their holy begging in their eyes." But Tourneur's Castiza takes our breath away when she adjures the trusted and reverenced mother, who has suffered her own better nature to be warped and darkened, and invites her daughter to suffer moral degradation, in the words—
Mother, come from that poisonous woman there!
It is a gleam of heavenly light blinding us out of the gloom. And when the Duchess of Malfi in her last struggle entreats—
I pray thee look thou givest my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now what you please