For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something, it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age? Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth, O heavens, If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause: is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness, You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both: is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind that we hear in Lear's appeal, And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man! and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?