fitting, but he longed to hear what Cordelia, his youngest and best
beloved child, would say. He looked toward her expectantly, but instead
of delight and gratitude there was the first dawn of character. Cordelia
made the awkward attempt of an untrained soul to be honest and
scrupulously to express her inmost feeling. The king was baffled and
distressed by this attempt at self-expression. It was new to him that
his daughter should be moved by a principle obtained outside himself,
which even his imagination could not follow; that she had caught the
notion of an existence in which her relation as a daughter played but a
part. She was transformed by a dignity which recast her speech and made
it self-contained. She found herself in the sweep of a feeling so large
that the immediate loss of a kingdom seemed of little consequence to
her. Even an act which might be construed as disrespect to her father
was justified in her eyes, because she was vainly striving to fill out
this larger conception of duty. The test which comes sooner or later to
many parents had come to Lear, to maintain the tenderness of the
relation between father and child, after that relation had become one
between adults, to be content with the responses made by the adult child
to the family claim, while at the same time she responded to the claims
of the rest of life. The mind of Lear was not big enough for this test;
he failed to see anything but the personal slight involved, and the
ingratitude alone reached him. It was impossible for him to calmly watch
his child developing beyond the stretch of his own mind and sympathy.

That a man should be so absorbed in his own indignation as to fail to
apprehend his child's thought, that he should lose his affection in his
anger, simply reveals the fact that his own emotions are dearer to him
than his sense of paternal obligation. Lear apparently also ignored the
common ancestry of Cordelia and himself, and forgot her royal
inheritance of magnanimity. He had thought of himself so long as a noble