But this is not so, I
think, with the repetition of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.
Here the daughter excites so much detestation, and the father so much
sympathy, that we often fail to receive the due impression of his
violence. There is not here, of course, the _injustice_ of his rejection
of Cordelia, but there is precisely the same [Greek: hubris]. This had
been shown most strikingly in the first scene when, _immediately_ upon
the apparently cold words of Cordelia, 'So young, my lord, and true,'
there comes this dreadful answer:
Let it be so; thy truth then be thy dower.
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night;
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter.
Now the dramatic effect of this passage is exactly, and doubtless
intentionally, repeated in the curse pronounced against Goneril.
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