The Play is all strewn throughout, and tinctured in the grain, with the finest natural philosophy, of that new and very subtle and peculiar kind, which belongs to the earlier stages of the physical inquiry, and while it was still in the hands of its original inventors. Even in physics, there are views here which have not been developed any further since this author's time. It is not merely in the direct discourse on questions of physical science, as in the physician's report of the resources of his art, or in Cordelia's invocation to 'all the _blessed secrets_--the _unpublished_ virtues of the earth,' that the track of the new physiological science, which this work embodies, may be seen. It runs through it all; it betrays itself at every turn. But the subtle and occult relations of the moral and physical are noted here, as we do not find them noted elsewhere, in less practical theories of nature. That there is something in the design of this play which requires an elaborate and systematic exhibition of the '_special_' human relationships, natural and artificial, political, social, and domestic, almost any reading of it would show. And that this design involves, also, a systematic exhibition of the social _consequences_ arising from the violation of the natural laws or duties of these relationships, and that this violation is everywhere systematically aggravated,--carried to its last conceivable extreme, so that all the play is filled with the uproar of one continued outrage on _humanity_; this is not less evident for the Poet is not content with the material which his chronicle offered him, already invented to his hands for this purpose, but he has deliberately tacked to it, and intricately connected with it throughout, another plot, bearing on the surface of it, and in the most prominent statements, the author's intention in this respect; which tends not only in the most unequivocal manner to repeat and corroborate the impressions which the story of Lear produces, but to widen the dramatic exhibition, so as to make it capable of conveying the whole breadth of the philosophic conception. For it is the scientific doctrine of MAN that is taught here; and that is, that man must be _human_ in _all_ his relations, or '_cease to be_.' It is the violation of the ESSENTIAL humanity. It is a DEGENERACY which is exhibited here, and the 'SEQUENT EFFECTS' which belong naturally to the violation of a law that has the force of the universe to sustain it. And it is not by accident that the story of the illegitimate Edmund begins the piece; it is not for nothing that we are compelled to stop to hear that, before even Lear and his daughters can make their entrance. The whole story of the _base_ and base-born one, who makes what he calls _nature_--the rude, brutal, spontaneous nature--his goddess and his law, and ignores the human distinction; this part was needed in order to supply the deficiences