Edm. So please your lordship, none.

[Putting up the letter.

Glou. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that

letter?

Edm. I know no news, my lord.

Glou. What paper were you reading?

Edm. Nothing, my lord.

Glou. No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? the quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let's see: come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.

Edm. I beseech you, sir, pardon me: it is a let

ter from my brother, that I have not all o'er-
read, and for so much as I have perused, I
find it not fit for your o'er-looking.

Glou. Give me the letter, sir.

Edm. I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame.

Glou. Let's see, let's see.

Edm. I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue.

30

40

Glou. [Reads] This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our 50 times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways, not as it hath

49. "and reverence"; omitted in Quartos.-I. G.

50. "best of our times"; best part of our lives.-C. H. H.

power, but as it is suffered. Come to me,
that of this I may speak more. If our
father would sleep till I waked him, you
should enjoy half his revenue for ever, and
live the beloved of your brother, EDGAR.'
Hum! Conspiracy!-'Sleep till I waked 60
him, you should enjoy half his revenue!'-
My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write
this? a heart and brain to breed it in?
came this to you? who brought it?

When

Edm. It was not brought me, my lord; there's the cunning of it; I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.

Glou. You know the character to be your brother's?

Edm. If the matter were good, my lord, I durst 70 swear it were his; but, in respect of that, I would fain think it were not.

Glou. It is his.

Edm. It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents.

Glou. Hath he never heretofore sounded you in this business?

Edm. Never, my lord: but I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit, that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declining, the father should 80 be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.

Glou. O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than brutish!

71. "that," i. e. the matter, contents.-I. G.

Go, sirrah, seek him; aye, apprehend him:
abominable villain! Where is he?

Edm. I do not well know, my lord. If it shall
please you to suspend your indignation
against my brother till you can derive from 90
him better testimony of his intent, you
should run a certain course; where, if you
violently proceed against him, mistaking his
purpose, it would make a great gap in your
own honor and shake in pieces the heart of
his obedience. I dare pawn down my life
for him that he hath wrote this to feel my
affection to your honor and to no further
pretense of danger.

you

so?

Glou. Think
Edm. If your honor judge it meet, I will place
you where you shall hear us confer of this,
and by an auricular assurance have your sat-
isfaction, and that without any further delay
than this very evening.

Glou. He cannot be such a monster

Edm. Nor is not, sure.

100

Glou. To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him. Heaven and earth! Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him, I 110 pray you: frame the business after your own wisdom. I would unstate myself, to be in a due resolution.

Edm. I will seek him, sir, presently, convey the

92. "where"; whereas.-C. H. H.
107-109. Omitted in Folios.-I. G.

business as I shall find means, and acquaint you withal. Glou. These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent 120 effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there's son against father: the king falls

He thinks inbout why

child.

13 so band & from bias of nature; there's father against

# will get

worse.

We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our 130 graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his offense, honesty! 'Tis strange. [Exit. Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortuneoften the surfeit of our own behavior-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; 140

117. "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good"; v. Preface.-I. G.

That is, though natural philosophy can give account of eclipses, yet we feel their consequences.-H. N. H.

124-131. Omitted in Quartos.-I. G.

137. "surfeit"; so Q. 1; Qq. 2, 3, "surfet"; Ff. 1, 2, 3; “surfets"; F. 4, "surfeits"; Collier conj. "forfeit.”—I. G.

He

knaves, thieves and treachers, by spherical
predominance; drunkards, liars and adulter-
ers, by an enforced obedience of planetary
influence; and all that we are evil in, by a
divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of
whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposi-
tion to the charge of a star! My father He thinks
compounded with my mother under the people
·relying
dragon's tail, and my nativity was under the stars
Ursa major: so that it follows I am rough 150 3
and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that stupid
I am, had the maidenliest star in the firma-
ment twinkled on my bastardizing, Ed-

discribes

gar

Enter Edgar.

And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the
old comedy: my cue is villainous melancholy,
with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. O, these
eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol,
la, mi.

151. "Tut!" is not in the folio.-Warburton thinks that the dotages of judicial astrology were meant to be satirized in this speech. Coleridge remarks upon Edmund's philosophizing as follows: "Thus scorn and misanthropy are often the anticipations and mouthpieces of wisdom in the detection of superstitions. Both individuals and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them, as well as by rising above them."-H. N. H.

155. Perhaps this was intended to ridicule the awkward conclusions of the old comedies, where the persons of the scene make their entry inartificially, and just when the poet wants them on the stage. In the folio, Edgar—and, at the beginning of this sentence, is wanting. The quartos also have out instead of pat.-H. N. H. 158. "fa, sol, la, mi"; Shakespeare shows by the context that he was well acquainted with the property of these syllables in solmisation, which imply a series of sounds so unnatural that ancient musicians prohibited their use. The monkish writers on music say

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