his side.
You are o' the commission, sit you too," addressing Kent.

"Purr, the cat is gray," shouts Edgar.

"Arraign her first, 'tis Goneril," cries Lear. "I here take my oath
before this honorable assembly, she kicked the poor king, her father."

"Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?" says the fool, addressing
the seat.

"And here's another," cries Lear. "Stop her there! arms, arms, sword,
fire! Corruption in the place! False justice, why hast thou let her
'scape?"

This raving terminates by Lear falling asleep and Gloucester persuading
Kent, still without recognizing him, to carry Lear to Dover, and Kent
and the fool carry off the King.

The scene is transferred to Gloucester's castle. Gloucester himself is
about to be accused of treason. He is brought forward and bound. The
Duke of Cornwall plucks out one of his eyes and sets his foot on it.
Regan says, "One side will mock another; the other too." The Duke wishes
to pluck the other out also, but some servant, for some reason, suddenly
takes Gloucester's part and wounds the Duke. Regan kills the servant,
who, dying, says to Gloucester that he has "one eye left to see some
mischief on him." The Duke says, "Lest it see more, prevent it," and he
tears out Gloucester's other eye and throws it on the ground. Here Regan
says that it was Edmund who betrayed his father and then Gloucester
immediately understands that he has been deceived and that Edgar did not
wish to kill him.

Thus ends the third act.

The fourth act is again on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic,
soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the
advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the
very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester,
led by an old man. In that characteristic Shakespearean language,--the
chief peculiarity of which is that the thoughts are bred either by the
consonance or the contrasts of words,--Gloucester also speaks about the
instability of fortune. He tells the old man who leads him to leave him,
but the old man points out to him that he can not _see_ his way.
Gloucester says he has no way and therefore does not require _eyes_. And
he argues about his having stumbled when he _saw_, and about defects
often proving commodities. "Ah! dear son Edgar," he adds, "might I but
live to _see_ thee in my touch, I'd say I had _eyes_ again." Edgar
naked, and in the character of a lunatic, hearing thi