moments they were true to their natures. The play is an excessive image of all that was most constant in Shakespeare's mind. Being an excessive image, it contains matter nowhere else given. It is all schemed and controlled with a power that he shows in no other play, not even in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_. The ideas of the play occur in many of the plays. Many images, such as the blasted oak, water in fury, servants insolent and servile, old honest men and young girls faithful to death, occur in other plays. That which each play added to the thought of the world is expressed in the single figure of someone caught in a net. Macbeth is a ruthless man so caught. Hamlet is a wise man so caught. Othello is a passionate and Antony a glorious man so caught. All are caught and all are powerless, and all are superb tragic inventions. King Lear is a grander, ironic invention, who hurts far more than any of these because he is a horribly strong man who is powerless. He is so strong that he cannot die. He is so strong that he nearly breaks the net, before the folds kill him. No image in the world is so fierce with imaginative energy. The stormy soul runs out storming in a night of the soul as mad as the elements. With him goes the invention of the Fool, the horribly faithful fool, like conscience or worldly wisdom, to flick him mad with ironic comment and bitter song. The verse is as great as the invention. It rises and falls with the passion like music with singing. All the scale of Shakespeare's art is used; the terrible spiritual manner of "You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts," as well as the instinctive manner of a prose coloured to the height with all the traditions of country life. Dramatic genius has the power of understanding half-a-dozen lives at once in tense, swiftly changing situations. This power is shown at its best in the last act of this play. One of the most wonderful and least praised of the inventions in the last scene is that of the dying Edmund. He has been treacherous to nearly every person in the play. His last treachery, indirectly the cause of his ruin, is still in act, the killing of Cordelia and the king. He has been stricken down. "The wheel has come full circle." He has learned too late that "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us."