Pray do not mock me; I am a very foolish fond old man, and ends-- Do not laugh at me; For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. or to her answer-- And so I am, I am! She has some cause to be angry with him, but her sisters none, he says; and she answers "No cause! no cause!" That, which is, perhaps, the finest passage in all literature, has not one metaphor, one trope, one "precious" phrase; but any old injured madman might speak just so. When poor, laughable, dissolute old Falstaff, dying, "babbles o' green fields"; when Lear at the last apostrophises his dead Cordelia-- Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! * * * Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir! * * * Do you see this? Look on her--look--her lips-- we can hardly bear to hear them. It is so much finer, because so much truer to nature than when those ingeniously poetical ladies, entreating the sepulture of their best beloved, urge that they are "rinsing their holy begging in their eyes." But Tourneur's Castiza takes our breath away when she adjures the trusted and reverenced mother, who has suffered her own better nature to be warped and darkened, and invites her daughter to suffer moral degradation, in the words-- Mother, come from that poisonous woman there! It is a gleam of heavenly light blinding us out of the gloom. And when the Duchess of Malfi in her last struggle entreats-- I pray thee look thou givest my little boy Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now what you please we are reminded of the equally touching words of Belvidera about her child, and the last words of dying Monimia: When I am laid low in the grave, and quite forgotten, May'st thou be happy in a fairer bride! But none can ever love thee like Monimia. * * * I'm here; who calls me? Methought I heard a voice Sweet as the shepherd's pipe upon the mountains When all his little flock's at feed before him * * * How my head swims. 'Tis very dark. Good night. It is true that the poet, since he takes the liberty to translate into verse men's ordinary language, may also interpret and mould his story, together with the speech it may involve, artistically, according to his own genius. But then the turn of thought, of feeling and of phraseology must have verisimilitude, that is to say, must seem related, not only to the event as it might appear to the poet personally, but as it ought to appear to him when he has imagined himself into the character and circumstances represented. Thus the strange figure made use of by Jaffier in addressing Pierre, who is about to be tortured on the rack, is felt to be absolutely fitting. For anger, despair, remorse, will sometimes burst forth in hyperbole. Wisdom is justified of her children.