No person--not even the shrewd, observing Fool--had detected in these early inconstancies of the King the tokens of impending insanity. But Shakspeare meant, no doubt, that the whim of abdication, the division of the kingdom, and the absurd project to travel with a hundred knights from one daughter's house to another, should hint to us that the royal brain was breaking down. An expert in the phenomena of insanity would have predicted what occurred so suddenly. But it shocked these unprepared beholders, and curdled every smile on the Fool's face into lines of mockery that ran full with tears. No king's misfortune was ever so bantered by its own pathos, as love and loyalty, contrasting with ingratitude, subsidized a Fool for the service of pity. But he cannot long employ his Irony upon our hearts, for events develop a dread earnest temper. There is no longer place for insinuation in the scene. The fortune of Lear seems to challenge all the elements to match it. As the reason topples, it appears to be clutching at the sky to save itself, and brings it down in the winds and lightnings of midnight to sympathize with its own eclipse. The Fool is cowed by the madness and the storm as they intermingle; his brave innuendoes die away; and he supplicates Lear, in plain language of human discomfort, to seek some shelter, even under such a blessing as one of his daughters can bestow, for that seems less inclement than the night. His vein runs very thin during Lear's delusion that he has his daughters in court and is trying them; and it soon disappears, swallowed in the quicksand of the king's lunacy. Kingdom, friends, reason, family, are all crumbled into this wreck of an old father, who pretends at last to hear the soft and gentle voice which used to temper the pride of his state and keep him human: he comes in to us hugging the hanged Cordelia to his cracking heart, to feel that she will come no more; she, whom he drove from his palace gate with violent misapprehension, will come no more,--never, never, never! Oh, it has grown too piteous for the wisest Fool: he can never share these scenes; his humor cannot lace these thundrous lines. Do they swell to the measure of the firmament itself, or is it our heart which is swelling to occupy that space? Yes: "Pray ye, undo this button." It is the heart, too big for any thing that ever made it smile. The lightnings of fate rend it into the drops of pity, and they wash all tolerating smiles away. Humor is too deeply implicated with our mortality, too warm a comrade, too judicious a friend in our extremities, to choose such hours of disaster to virtue for any task of reconciliation. Awful and questioning spirits come; and Humor, yielding to them our hand, stands aside to wait, but yields it warm enough to keep warm through any grasp till it may be claimed again.