[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break, heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern texts are eclectic.] [Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,' etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116): _Fool_. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold. Look, here comes a walking fire. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a torch.] Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a point some dozen lines later.] [Footnote 165: The passages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff. and IV. i. 67 ff.): _Lear._ Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens just. _Glo._ Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still! Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly; So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough.] [Footnote 166: Schmidt's idea--based partly on the omission from the Folios at I. ii. 103 (see Furness' Variorum) of the words 'To his father that so tenderly and entirely loves him'--that Gloster loved neither of his sons, is surely an entire mistake. See, not to speak of general impressions, III. iv. 171 ff.] [Footnote 167: Imagination demands for Lear, even more than for Othello, majesty of stature and mien. Tourgenief felt this and made his 'Lear of the Steppes' a _gigantic_ peasant. If Shakespeare's texts give no express authority for ideas like these, the reason probably is that he wrote primarily for the theatre, where the principal actor might not be a large man.]