As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage from Lear’s entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction He dies (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the Captain’s words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect.  I speak from experience.  I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies were so exhausted long before Lear’s death that his last speech, the most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]

[Footnote 163:  The Quartos give the ‘Never’ only thrice (surely wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier task.  I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words ’Break, heart; I prithee, break!’ to Lear, not Kent.  They and the Folio are at odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern texts are eclectic.]

[Footnote 164:  The connection of these sufferings with the sin of earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon our notice by the levity of Gloster’s own reference to the subject in the first scene, and by Edgar’s often quoted words ‘The gods are just,’ etc.  The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116): 

Fool.  Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher’s heart; a small spark, all the rest on’s body cold.  Look, here comes a walking fire. [Enter GLOSTER with a torch.]

Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a point some dozen lines later.]

[Footnote 165:  The passages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff. and IV. i. 67 ff.): 

Lear. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?  O, I have ta’en Too little care of this!  Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens just.

Glo. Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens’ plagues Have humbled to all strokes:  that I am wretched Makes thee the happier:  heavens, deal so still!  Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly; So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough.]

[Footnote 166:  Schmidt’s idea—­based partly on the omission from the Folios at I. ii. 103 (see Furness’ Variorum) of the words ’To his father that so tenderly and entirely loves him’—­that Gloster loved neither of his sons, is surely an entire mistake.  See, not to speak of general impressions, III. iv. 171 ff.]