Cordelia’s departure had been a great grief to this affectionate creature, and after she went to France he pined and pined away, and kept sadly aloof from his master. But King Lear, missing his favourite, sent for him, and the poor Fool came in answer to the summons, glib of tongue, but with eyes that looked sorrowful enough under his cap and bells. His speech was ready, as usual, but his wit was tinged with bitter philosophy, and his sayings conveyed many a sharp home-truth to the misguided monarch. The King suffered him to speak what he would have allowed no one else to utter, and the Fool, in half-mocking words, pointed out with blunt plainness the folly of the King in giving away his possessions. Later on, when Goneril appeared, and with her lying statements and heartless insolence almost goaded Lear to madness, the poor Fool tried, by every means in his power, to divert the King’s mind; he desperately interposed after some of Goneril’s most biting speeches, trying to take off their edge by a little twist of humour, and to distract the King’s attention from his daughter’s cruelty by bringing reproof upon himself by his own impertinent sallies. Poor faithful heart! He might as well have tried to divert a thunderbolt with a harlequin’s wand. In the storm that was now to burst over them, the poor thrall could do nothing to save his master, but at least he could cling to him with unswerving fidelity, and share his wanderings and misery. The Duke of Albany, less hard-hearted than his wife, tried to soften her harsh severity, but his attempts were useless. She declined to listen to any reasoning, called his mildness “want of wisdom,” and, acting on her own authority, suddenly dismissed fifty of her father’s knights, on the frivolous and altogether false pretext that they conducted themselves in a riotous fashion in her house, and that it was dangerous for the lives of herself and her husband for Lear to keep such a large guard about him.