how preposterous that would sound, if he were to go down
on his knees, and beg of his own daughter for food and raiment, and he
argued against such an unnatural dependence, declaring his resolution
never to return with her, but to stay where he was with Regan, he and
his hundred knights; for he said that she had not forgot the half of the
kingdom which he had endowed her with, and that her eyes were not fierce
like Goneril's, but mild and kind. And he said that rather than return
to Goneril, with half his train cut off, he would go over to France,
and beg a wretched pension of the king there, who had married his
youngest daughter without a portion.

But he was mistaken in expecting kinder treatment of Regan than he had
experienced from her sister Goneril. As if willing to outdo her sister
in unfilial behaviour, she declared that she thought fifty knights too
many to wait upon him: that five-and-twenty were enough. Then Lear, nigh
heart-broken, turned to Goneril and said that he would go back with her,
for her fifty doubled five-and-twenty, and so her love was twice as much
as Regan's. But Goneril excused herself, and said, what need of so many
as five-and-twenty? or even ten? or five? when he might be waited upon
by her servants, or her sister's servants? So these two wicked
daughters, as if they strove to exceed each other in cruelty to their
old father, who had been so good to them, by little and little would
have abated him of all his train, all respect (little enough for him
that once commanded a kingdom), which was left him to show that he had
once been a king! Not that a splendid train is essential to happiness,
but from a king to a beggar is a hard change, from commanding millions
to be without one attendant; and it was the ingratitude in his
daughters' denying it, more than what he would suffer by the want of it,
which pierced this poor king to the heart; insomuch, that with this
double ill-usage, and vexation for having so foolishly given away a
kingdom, his wits began to be unsettled, and while he said he knew not
what, he vowed revenge against those unnatural hags, and to make
examples of them that should be a terror to the earth!

While he was thus idly threatening what his weak arm could never
execute, night came on, and a loud storm of thunder and lightning with
rain; and his daughters still persisting in their resolution not to
admit his followers, he called for his horses, and chose rather to
encounter