Shakespear exhibits beautiful examples of the irregular influence of passion in making us conceive things to be otherwise than they are. King Lear, in his distress, personifies the rain, wind, and thunder; and in order to justify his resentment, conceives them to be taking part with his daughters. _Lear._ Rumble thy belly-full, spit fire, spout rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters. I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children; You owe me no subscription. Then let fall Your horrible pleasure.---- Here I stand, your brave; A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man! But yet I call you servile ministers, That have with two pernicious daughters join’d Your high engender’d battles, ’gainst a head So old and white as this. Oh! oh! ’tis foul. _Act_ 3. _sc. 2._ King Richard, full of indignation against his favourite horse for suffering Bolingbroke to ride him, conceives for a moment the horse to be rational. _Groom._ O, how it yearn’d my heart, when I beheld, In London streets, that coronation-day; When Bolingbroke rode on Roan Barbary, That horse that thou so often hast bestrid, That horse that I so carefully have dress’d. _K. Rich._ Rode he on Barbary? tell me, gentle friend, How went he under him? _Groom._ So proudly as he had disdain’d the ground. _K. Rich._ So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back! That jade had eat bread from my royal hand. This hand hath made him proud with clapping him. Would he not stumble? would he not fall down, (Since pride must have a fall), and break the neck Of that proud man that did usurp his back? _Richard_ II. _act 5. sc. 11_. Hamlet, swelled with indignation at his mother’s second marriage, is strongly inclined to lessen the time of her widowhood; because this circumstance gratified his passion; and he deludes himself by degrees into the opinion of an interval shorter than the real one.