One fact about Kent is often overlooked.  He is an old man.  He tells Lear that he is eight and forty, but it is clear that he is much older; not so old as his master, who was ‘four-score and upward’ and whom he ’loved as his father,’ but, one may suppose, three-score and upward.  From the first scene we get this impression, and in the scene with Oswald it is repeatedly confirmed.  His beard is grey.  ‘Ancient ruffian,’ ’old fellow,’ ’you stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart’—­these are some of the expressions applied to him.  ‘Sir,’ he says to Cornwall, ’I am too old to learn.’  If his age is not remembered, we fail to realise the full beauty of his thoughtlessness of himself, his incessant care of the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate.[174] We lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his task is nearly done.  Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him saying,

My point and period will be throughly wrought
Or well or ill, as this day’s battle’s fought.

His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about Edgar’s neck; bellows out as he’d burst heaven (how like him!);

                     threw him on my father,
     Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him
     That ever ear received; which in recounting
     His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life
     Began to crack.  Twice then the trumpet sounded,
     And there I left him tranced;

and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his voice: 

I am come
To bid my king and master aye goodnight.

This desire possesses him wholly.  When the bodies of Goneril and Regan are brought in he asks merely, ‘Alack, why thus?’ How can he care?  He is waiting for one thing alone.  He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his failure to receive it.  It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he murmurs, as his master dies, ‘Break, heart, I prithee, break!’ He puts aside Albany’s invitation to take part in the government; his task is over: 

     I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: 
     My master calls me; I must not say no.

Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his desire to follow his dead lord, has been well likened to Horatio.  But Horatio is not old; nor is he hot-headed; and though he is stoical he is also religious.  Kent, as compared with him and with Edgar, is not so.  He has not Edgar’s ever-present faith in the ‘clearest gods.’  He refers to them, in fact, less often than to fortune or the stars.  He lives mainly by the love in his own heart.[175]

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