Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Adaptations; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Stories, plots, etc. -- Juvenile literature
But he that has a little tiny wit--
With heigh ho, the wind and the rain,--
Must make content with his fortunes fit
Though the rain it raineth every day,
and swearing it was a brave night to cool a lady’s pride.
Thus poorly accompanied, this once great monarch was found by his
ever-faithful servant the good Earl of Kent, now transformed to
Caius, who ever followed close at his side, though the king did
not know him to be the earl; and be said:
“Alas, sir, are you here? Creatures that love night love not such
nights as these. This dreadful storm has driven the beasts to
their hiding-places. Man’s nature cannot endure the affliction or
the fear.”
And Lear rebuked him and said these lesser evils were not felt
where a greater malady was fixed. When the mind is at ease the
body has leisure to be delicate, but the tempest in his mind did
take all feeling else from his senses but of that which beat at
his heart. And he spoke of filial ingratitude, and said it was
all one as if the mouth should tear the hand for lifting food to
it; for parents were hands and food and everything to children.
But the good Caius still persisting in his entreaties that the
king would not stay out in the open air, at last persuaded him to
enter a little wretched hovel which stood upon the heath, where
the fool first entering, suddenly ran back terrified, saying that
he had seen a spirit. But upon examination this spirit proved to
be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar who had crept into this
deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils
frighted the fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad,
or feign to be so, the better to extort charity from the
compassionate country people, who go about the country calling
themselves poor Tom and poor Turlygood, saying, “Who gives
anything to poor Tom?” sticking pins and nails and sprigs of
rosemary into their arms to make them bleed; and with horrible
actions, partly by prayers, and partly with lunatic curses, they
move or terrify the ignorant country folk into giving them alms.
This poor fellow was such a one; and the king, seeing him in so
wretched a plight, with nothing but a blanket about his loins to
cover his nakedness, could not be persuaded but that the fellow
was some father who had given all away to his daughters and
brought himself to that pass; for nothing, he thought, could
bring a man to such wretchedness but the having unkind daughters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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