There is a wild gibberish heard in the straw. The fool shrieks, 'Nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes 'Tom o Bedlam'--the naked creature, as Gloster calls him--with his 'elf locks,' his 'blanketed loins,' his 'begrimed face,' with his shattered wits, his madness, real or assumed--there he stands. We know, indeed, in this instance, that there is gentle, nay, noble blood, there, under that horrid guise. It is the heir of a dukedom, we are told, but an out-cast one, who has found himself compelled, for the sake of prolonging life, to assume that shape, as other wretches were in the Poet's time for that same purpose,--men who had lost _their_ dukedoms, too, as it would seem, such as they were, in some way, and their human relationships, too. But notwithstanding this alleviating circumstance which enables the audience to endure the exhibition in this instance, it serves not the less effectually in the Poet's hand, as 'THE CONSPICUOUS INSTANCE' of that lowest human condition which this grand Social Tragedy must needs include in its delineations. Here are some of the prose English descriptions of this creature, which we find already included in the commentaries on this tragedy; and which shew that the Poet has not exaggerated his portrait, and that it is not by way of celebrating any Anglo-Saxon or Norman triumph over the barbarisms of the _joint_ reigns of REGAN _and_ GONERIL, that he is produced here. 'I remember, before the civil wars, Tom o' Bedlams went about begging,' Aubrey says. Randle Holme, in his 'Academy of Arms and Blazon,' includes them in his descriptions, as a class of vagabonds 'feigning themselves mad.' 'The Bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff,' etc., 'but his cloathing is more fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with _rubans, feathers, cuttings_ of _cloth,_ and what not, to make him _seem_ a madman, when he is no other than a _dissembling knave_.' In the Bellman of London, 1640, there is another description of him--'He sweares he hath been in Bedlam, and will talk frantickely _of purpose; you see pinnes_ stuck in sundry places of his _naked flesh_, especially in his armes, _which paine he gladly puts himselfe to_; calls himself by the name of _Poore Tom_; and coming near anybody, cries out, '_Poor Tom's a cold_.' Of these Abraham men, _some be exceeding merry_, and doe nothing but sing songs, fashioned out of their own braines; some will dance; others will doe nothing but either laugh or weepe; _others are dogged_, and so _sullen_, both in looke and speech, that spying but a small company in a house, they bluntly and boldly enter, compelling the servants, through fear, to them what they demand.' This seems very wicked, very depraved, on the part of these persons, especially the sticking of pins in their bare arms; but even our young dukeling Edgar says--