EDMUND.
I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an essay, or taste of my virtue.
GLOUCESTER.
[Reads.] ‘This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways not as it hath power, but as it is suffered. Come to me, that of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I waked him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever, and live the beloved of your brother EDGAR.’
Hum! Conspiracy? ‘Sleep till I wake him, you should enjoy half his revenue.’—My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write this? A heart and brain to breed it in? When came this to you? Who brought it?
EDMUND.
It was not brought me, my lord, there’s the cunning of it. I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.
GLOUCESTER.
You know the character to be your brother’s?
EDMUND.
If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would fain think it were not.
GLOUCESTER.
It is his.
EDMUND.
It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents.
GLOUCESTER.
Has he never before sounded you in this business?
EDMUND.
Never, my lord. But I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
GLOUCESTER.
O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than brutish! Go, sirrah, seek him; I’ll apprehend him. Abominable villain, Where is he?