In Lear's meeting with Goneril after the curse you saw at once the broken condition of an aged, infirm, and mentally disordered man, who had already forgotten his own terrible words. "We'll no more meet, no more see one another" is a line to which McCullough gave its full eloquence of abject mournfulness and forlorn desolation. Other denotements of subtlety were seen in his sad preoccupation with memories of the lost Cordelia, while talking with the Fool. "I did her wrong" was never more tenderly spoken than by him. They are only four little words; but they carry the crushing weight of eternal and hopeless remorse. It was in this region of delicate, imaginative touch that McCullough's dramatic art was especially puissant. He was the first actor of Lear to discriminate between the agony of a man while going mad and the careless, volatile, fantastic condition--afflicting to witness, but no longer agonising to the lunatic himself--of a man who has actually lapsed into madness. Edwin Forrest--whose Lear is much extolled, often by persons who, evidently, never saw it--much as he did with the part, never even faintly suggested such a discrimination as that. To one altitude of Lear's condition it is probably impossible for dramatic art to rise--the mood of divine philosophy, warmed with human tenderness, in which the dazed but semi-conscious vicegerent of heaven moralises over human life. There is a grandeur in that conception so vast that nothing short of the rarest inspiration of genius can rise to it. The deficiences of McCullough's Lear were found in the analysis of that part of the performance. He had the heart of Lear, the royalty, the breadth; but not all of either the exalted intellect, the sorrow-laden experience, or the imagination--so gorgeous in its disorder, so infinitely pathetic in its misery. His performance of Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and then--and rightly broken--with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting in tragic climax.