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 satisfaction; and that without any farther delay than this very evening.

Glos. He cannot be such a monster.

Edm. Nor is not, sure.

Glos. To his father, that so tenderly and intirely loves him.-Heaven and earth!-Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him, I pray you: frame the business after your own wisdom: I would unstate myself, to be in a due resolution.1

Edm. I will seek him, sir, presently; convey 2 the business as I shall find means; and acquaint you withal.

Glos. 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 effects: 3 love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities mutinies, in countries discord, in palaces treason; and the bond cracked between son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there's son against father: the king falls from bias of nature; there's father against child. We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollow

I would give my estate to be certain of the truth.

2 Manage.

3 i. e. though natural philosophy can give account of eclipses, yet we feel their consequences.

ness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves!-Find out this villain, Edmund! it shall lose thee nothing: do it carefully. And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his offence, honesty!-Strange! strange!

[Exit.

Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world! that, when we are sick in fortune, (often 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; knaves, thieves, and treachers 1 by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under ursa major ; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar

Enter EDGAR.

and pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villanous melancholy, with a sigh

Traitors.

like Tom o' Bedlam. O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.1

Edg. How now, brother Edmund? What serious contemplation are you in?

Edm. I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses.

Edg. Do you busy yourself with that?

Edm. I promise you, the effects he writes of, succeed unhappily; as of unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against king and nobles; needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.

Edg. How long have you been a sectary astronomical?

Edm. Come, come; when saw you my father last?

Edg. Why, the night gone by.

Edm. Spake you with him?

Edg. Ay, two hours together.

Edm. Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him, by word or countenance? Edg. None at all.

Edm. Bethink yourself, wherein you may have offended him; and, at my entreaty, forbear his pre

1 These sounds are deemed unnatural and offensive in music.

sence, till some little time hath qualified the heat of his displeasure, which at this instant so rageth in him, that with the mischief of your person it would scarcely allay.

Edg. Some villain hath done me wrong.

Edm. That's my fear. I pray you, have a continent1 forbearance, till the speed of his rage goes slower; and, as I say, retire with me to my lodging, from whence I will fitly bring you to hear my lord speak. Pray you, go; there's my key: if you do stir abroad, go armed.

Edg. Armed, brother?

Edm. Brother, I advise you to the best; go armed: I am no honest man, if there be any good meaning towards you: I have told you what I have' seen and heard but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it. Pray you, away.

Edg. Shall I hear from you anon ?
Edm. I do serve you in this business.-

[Exit Edgar.

A credulous father, and a brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
My practices ride easy!—I see the business.—

Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit:

All with me 's meet, that I can fashion fit. [Exit.

1 Temperate.

SCENE III.

A room in the Duke of Albany's palace.

Enter GONERIL and STEWard.

Gon. Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool?

Stew. Ay, madam.

Gon. By day and night, he wrongs me; every

hour

He flashes into one gross crime or other,

That sets us all at odds: I'll not endure it:
His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
On every trifle.-When he returns from hunting,
I will not speak with him: say, I am sick :
If you come slack of former services,

You shall do well; the fault of it I'll answer.
Stew. He's coming, madam; I hear him.

[horns within. Gon. Put on what weary negligence you please, You and your fellows; I'd have it come to

question :

If he dislike it, let him to my sister,

Whose mind and mine, I know, in that are one,
Not to be over-ruled. Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away!-Now, by my life,
Old fools are babes again; and must be used

With checks, as flatteries,-when they are seen

abused.