'While I may scape, I _will preserve myself_: and am bethought To take _the basest_ and _most poorest shape_, That ever _penury_, in _contempt_ of MAN, _Brought near to beast_: my face I'll grime with filth; Blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots; And with presented nakedness outface The winds, and _persecutions of the sky_. The _country gives_ me PROOF and PRECEDENT Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, _Strike_ in _their numb'd and mortified bare arms, Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary_; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills, _Sometime with lunatic bans_, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity.--'Poor Turlygood!' 'poor Tom!' _Thats something yet, Edgar I nothing am_. But the poet is not contented with the minuteness of this description. This character appears to have taken his eye as completely as it takes King Lear's, the moment that _he_ gets a glimpse of him; and the poet betrays throughout that same philosophical interest in the study, which the monarch expresses so boldly; for beside the dramatic exhibition, and the philosophical review of him, which King Lear institutes, here is an autographical sketch of him, and of his mode of living-- '_What_ are you there? Your _names_?' cries Gloster, when he comes to the heath, with his torch, to seek out the king and his party; whereupon Tom, thinking that an occasion has now arrived for defining his social outline, takes it upon him to answer, for his part-- 'Poor Tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water-[newt]; that in the fury of his heart, when the _foul fiend rages_, swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; _who is whipped_ from _tything_ to _tything_' [this is an Anglo-Saxon institution one sees]; 'and stocked, punished, and imprisoned; who _hath had_ three suits to his back' [fallen fortunes here, too] 'six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapon to wear.'