How now, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
Lest it may mar your fortunes,

so intensifies her horror at the hypocrisy of her sisters that she replies,

                             Good my Lord,
     You have begot me, bred me, loved me:  I
     Return those duties back as are right fit,
     Obey you, love you, and most honour you. 
     Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
     They love you all?  Haply, when I shall wed,
     That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
     Half my love with him, half my care and duty: 
     Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
     To love my father all.

What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness!  Blank astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the moment he restrains himself and asks,

But goes thy heart with this?

Imagine Imogen’s reply!  But Cordelia answers,

Ay, good my lord.

Lear. So young, and so untender?

Cor. So young, my lord, and true.

Yes, ‘heavenly true.’  But truth is not the only good in the world, nor is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation.  The matter here was to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father.  And even if truth were the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not to tell it.  And Cordelia’s speech not only tells much less than truth about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to give love to a husband is to take it from a father.  There surely never was a more unhappy speech.

When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life, her horror of her brother’s sin is so intense, and her perception of the justice of Angelo’s reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her for her coldness and urges her on.  Cordelia’s hatred of hypocrisy and of the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of Isabella’s hatred of impurity; but Cordelia’s position is infinitely more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a touch of personal antagonism and of pride.  Lear’s words,

     Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]

are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia’s, and with so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride and resentment.  This side of her character is emphatically shown in her language to her sisters in the first scene—­language perfectly just, but little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father—­and again in the very last words we hear her speak.  She and her father are brought in, prisoners, to the enemy’s camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those ‘greater’ ones on whose pleasure hangs her father’s fate and her own.  For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity: