its circumference is taken. For the sovereignty of law, the kingship of the universal law in whomsoever it speaks, awful with God's power, armed with his pains and penalties is the scientific sovereignty; and in the scientific diagrams the passions, the poor and private passions,' and the arbitrary will, in whomsoever they speak, no matter what symbols of sovereignty they have contrived to usurp, make no better figure in their struggles with that law, than that same which the poet's vivid imagination and intense perception of incompatibilities, has seized on here. The king struggles vainly against the might of the universal nature. It is but the shot out of an ' elder gun;' he might as well 'go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.' 'I should be angry with you,' continues the king, after noticing the roundness of that reply, 'I should be angry with you, if the time were convenient.'

But as to the poet who composes these dialogues, of course he does not know whether the time is convenient or not;-he has never reflected upon any of those grave questions which are here so seriously discussed. They are not questions in which he can be supposed to have taken any interest. Of course he does not know or care what it is that these men are talking about. It is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that his interlocutors are permitted to go on in this manner.

It is easy to see, however, what extraordinary capabilities this particular form of writing offered to one who had any purpose, or to an author, who wished on any account, to 'infold' somewhat his meaning;-that was the term used then in reference to this style of writing. For certainly, many things dangerous in themselves could be shuffled in under cover of an artistic effect, which would not strike at the time, amid the agitations, and the skilful checks, and counteractions, of the scene, even the quick ear of despotism itself.

And thus King Lear-that impersonation of absolutismthe very embodiment of pure will and tyranny in their most frantic form, taken out all at once from that hot bath of flatteries to which he had been so long accustomed, that his whole self

consciousness had become saturated, tinctured in the grain with them, and he believed himself to be, within and without, indestructibly, essentially, ay, every inch A KING;' with speeches on his supremacy copied, well nigh verbatim, from those which Elizabeth's courtiers habitually addressed to her, still ringing in his ears, hurled out into a single-handed contest with the elements, stripped of all his social and artificial lendings,' the poor, bare, unaccommodated, individual man, this living subject of the poet's artistic treatment, — this 'ruined Majesty' anatomized alive, taken to pieces literally before our eyes, pursued, hunted down scientifically, and robbed in detail of all the additions of a king'-must, of course, be expected to evince in some way his sense of it; for soul and body,' this poet tells us, 'rive not more in parting than greatness going off.'

Once conceive the possibility of presenting the action, the dumb show, of this piece upon the stage at that time, (there have been times since when it could not be done,) and the dialogue, with its illimitable freedoms, follows without any difficulty. For the surprise of the monarch at the discoveries which this new state of things forces upon him, - the speeches he makes, with all the levelling of their philosophy, with all the unsurpassable boldness of their political criticism, are too natural and proper to the circumstances, to excite any surprise or question.

Indeed, a king, who, nurtured in the flatteries of the palace, was unlearned enough in the nature of things, to suppose that the name of a king was anything but a shadow when the power which had sustained its prerogative was withdrawn,—a king who thought that he could still be a king, and maintain his state' and 'his hundred knights,' and their prerogatives, and all his old arbitrary, despotic humours, with their inevitable encroachment on the will and humours, and on the welfare of others, merely on grounds of respect and affection, or on grounds of duty, when not merely the care of the state,' but the revenues and power of it had been devolved on otherssuch an one appeared, indeed, to the poet, to be engaging in an experiment very similar to the one which he found in pro

gress in his time, in that old, decayed, riotous form of military government, which had chosen the moment of its utter dependance on the popular will and respect, as the fitting one for its final suppression of the national liberties. It was an experiment which was, of course, modified in the play by some diverting and strongly pronounced differences, or it would not have been possible to produce it then; but it was still the experiment of the unarmed prerogative, that the old popular tale of the ancient king of Britain offered to the poet's hands, and that was an experiment which he was willing to see traced to its natural conclusion on paper at least; while in the subsequent development of the plot, the presence of an insulted trampled outcast majesty on the stage, furnishes a cover of which the poet is continually availing himself, for putting the case of that other outraged sovereignty, whose cause under one form or another, under all disguises, he is always pleading. And in the poet's hands, the debased and outcast king, becomes the impersonation of a debased and violated state, that had given all to its daughters,-the victim of a tyranny not less absolute, the victim, too, of a blindness and fatuity on its own part, not less monstrous, but not, not-that is the poet's word—not yet irretrievable.

"Thou shalt find.

I will resume that shape, which thou dost think

I have cast off for ever; thou shalt, I warrant thee.'
'Do you mark that, my lord?'

But the question of that prerogative, which has consumed, in the poet's time, all the faculties of government constitutes only a subordinate part of the action of that great play, into which it is here incorporated; a play which comprehends in its new philosophical reaches, in its new and before-unimagined subtilties of analysis, the most radical questions of a practical human science; questions which the practical reason of these modern ages at the moment of its awakening, found itself already compelled to grapple with, and master.

CHAPTER II.

UNACCOMMODATED MAN.

'Consider him well.-Three of us are sophisticated.'

OR this is the grand SOCIAL tragedy. It is the tragedy of an unlearned human society; it is the tragedy of a civilization in which grammar, and the relations of sounds and abstract notions to each other have sufficed to absorb the attention of the learned,―a civilization in which the parts of speech, and their relations, have been deeply considered, but one in which the social elements, the parts of life, and their unions, and their prosody, have been left to spontaneity, and empiricism, and all kinds of rude, arbitrary, idiomatical conjunctions, and fortuitous rules; a civilization in which the learning of 'WORDS' is put down by the reporter-invented — and the learning of 'THINGS'- omitted.

And in a movement which was designed to bring the human reason to bear scientifically and artistically upon those questions in which the deepest human interests are involved, the wrong and misery of that social state to which the New Machine, with its new combination of sense and reason, must be applied, had to be fully and elaborately brought out and exhibited. And there was but one language in which the impersonated human misery and wrong, the speaker for countless hearts, tortured and broken on the rude machinery of unlearned social customs, and lawless social forces, could speak; there was but one tongue in which it could tell its story. For this is the place where science becomes inevitably poetical. That same science which fills our cabinets and herbariums, and chambers of natural history, with mute stones and shells and plants and dead birds and insects-that same science that fills our scientific volumes with coloured pictures

true as life itself, and letter-press of prose description—that same science that anatomises the physical frame with microscopic nicety, in the hand of its master, found in the soul, that which had most need of science; and his 'illustrated book' of it, the book of his experiments in it, comes to us filled with his yet living, ‘ever living' subjects, and resounding with the tragedy of their complainings.

It requires but a little reading of that book to find, that the author of it is a philosopher who is strongly disposed to ascertain the limits of that thing in nature, which men call fortune,

that is, in their week-day speech,—they have another name for it 'o' Sundays.' He is greatly of the opinion, that the combined and legitimate use of those faculties with which man is beneficently armed against diseases of the world,' would tend very much to limit those fortuities and accidents, those wild blows, those vicissitudes, that men, in their ignorance and indolent despair, charge on Fate or ascribe to Providence, while at the same time it would furnish the art of accommodating the human mind to that which is inevitable. It is not fortune who is blind, but man, he says,—a creature endowed of nature for his place in nature, endowed of God with a godlike faculty, looking before and after-a creature who has eyes, eyes adapted to his special necessities, but one that will not use them.

Acquaintance with law, as it is actual in nature, and inventions of arts based on that acquaintance, appear to him to open a large field of relief to the human estate, a large field of encroachment on that human misery, which men have blindly and stupidly acquiesced in hitherto, as necessity. For this is the philosopher who borrows, on another page, an ancient fable to teach us that that is not the kind of submission which is pleasing to God—that that is not the kind of 'suffering' that will ever secure his favour. He, for one, is going to search this social misery to the root, with that same light which the ancient wise man tells us, is as the lamp of God, wherewith He searcheth the inwardness of all secrets.'

The weakness and ignorance and misery of the natural man, -the misery too of the artificial man as he is, the misery of