Thomas Middleton has a play called The Witch, wherein are delineated with considerable skill the vulgar hags of old superstition, whose delight was to " raise jars, jealousies, strifes, and heartburning disagreements, like a thick scurf o'er life." Much ques

tion has been had whether this or Macbeth were written first, with the view on one side, as would seem, to make out for Middleton the honour of contributing somewhat towards the Poet's Weird Sisters. Malone has perhaps done all the case admits of, to show that The Witch was not written before 1613; but in truth there is hardly enough to ground an opinion upon one way or the other. And the question may be safely dismissed as altogether vain; for the two plays have nothing in common, but what may well enough have been derived from Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, or from the floating witchcraft lore of the time, some relics of which have drifted down in the popular belief to a period within our remembrance.

The old witches of superstition were foul, ugly, mischievous beings, genera ly actuated by vulgar envy or hate; not so much wicked as mean, and therefore apt to excite disgust, but not to inspire terror or awe; who could inflict injury, but not guilt; could work men's physical ruin, but not win them to work their own spiritual ruin. The Weird Sisters of Shakespeare, as hath been often remarked, are essentially different, and are beholden to them for little if any thing more than the drapery of the representation. Resembling old women, save that they have long beards, they bubble up in human shape, but own no human relations; are without age, or sex, or kin; without birth or death: passionless and motiveless. A combination of the terrible and the grotesque, unlike the Furies of Eschylus they are petrific, not to the senses, but to the thoughts. At first, indeed, on merely looking at them, we can scarce help laughing, so uncouth and grotesque is their appearance: but afterwards, on looking into them, we find them terrible beyond description; and the more we look, the more terrible do they become ;, the blood almost curdling in our veins, as, dancing and singing their infernal glees over embryo murders, they unfold to our thoughts the cold, passionless, inexhaustible malignity and deformity of their nature. Towards Macbeth they have nothing of personal hatred or revenge: their malice is of a higher strain, and savours as little of any such human ranklings as the thunderstorms and elemental perturbations amidst which they come and go. But with all their essential wickedness there is nothing gross, or vulgar, or sensual about them. They are the very purity of sin incarnate; the vestal virgins, so to speak, of hell; in whom every thing seems reversed; whose ascent is downwards; whose proper eucharist is a sacrament of evil; and the law of whose being is violation of law!

The later critics, Coleridge especially, dwell much on what they conceive to be the most distinctive and essential feature of

Shakespeare's art, affirming it to be the organic involution of the universal in the particular; that his characters are classes individualized; that his men and women are those of his own age and nation indeed, yet not in such sort but that they are equally the men and women of all ages and nations; for which cause they can never become obsolete, or cease to be natural and true Herein the Weird Sisters are thoroughly Shakespearian, there being nothing in his whole circle of character, wherein this method of art is more profoundly exemplified. Probably no form of superstition ever prevailed to any great extent, but that it had a ground and principle of truth. The old system of witchcraft was no doubt an embodiment of some natural law, a local and temporary outgrowth from something as general and permanent as human nature itself. Our moral being must breathe, and because it must have breath, therefore, in defect of other provision, it puts forth some such arrangement of breathing organs, as a tree puts forth leaves. The point of art, then, in this case was to raise and transfigure the literal into the symbolical; to take the body, so brittle and perishable in itself, and endow it with immortality; which of course could be done only by filling and animating it with the efficacy of imperishable truth. Accordingly the Poet took enough of current and traditionary matter to enlist old credulity in behalf of agents suited to his peculiar purpose; representing to the age its own thoughts, and at the same time informing the representation with a deep moral significance suited to all ages alike. In The Witch we have but the literal form of a transient superstition: in Macbeth that form is made the transparent vehicle of a truth coeval and coextensive with the workings of human guilt. In their literal character the Weird Sisters answer to something that was, and is not; in their symbolical character they answer to something that was, and is, and will abide; for they represent the mysterious action and reaction between the evil mind and external nature.

For the external world serves in some sort as a looking-glass, wherein man beholds the image of his fallen nature; and he still regards that image as his friend or his foe, and so parleys with it or turns from it, according as his will is more disposed to evil or to good. For the evil suggestions, which seem to us written in the face or speaking from the mouth of external objects and occasions, are in reality but projections from our own evil hearts. these are instances wherein "we do receive but what we give : the things we look upon seem inviting us to crime, whereas in truth our wishes construe their innocent meanings into wicked invitations. In the spirit and virtue of which principle the Weird Sisters symbolize the inward moral history of each and every man, and therefore may be expected to live in the faith of reason so long as the present moral order or disorder of things shall last So that they may be aptly enough described as poetical or mythi. cal impersonations of evil influences; as bodying forth in living

turm the fearful echo which the natural world gives back to the evi wat speaks out from the human heart. And the secret of their power over Macbeth lies mainly in that they present to him his embryc wishes and half-formed thoughts: at one time they harp his feat aight, at another time his hope; and that, too, even before such hope and fear have distinctly reported themselves in his conscious Ass; and by thus harping them, strengthen them into resolutior and develope them into act. As men often know they would omething, yet know not clearly what, until they hear it spoken by nother; and sometimes even dream of being told things which 4. ir minds have been tugging at, but could not put into words. All which may serve to suggest the real nature and scope of effect which the Weird Sisters have on the action of the play; hat their office is not so properly to deprave as to develope the •haracters whereon they act; not to create the evil heart, but to anie the evil hands. They put nothing into Macbeth's mind, but only draw out what was already there, breathing fructification upon his indwelling germs of sin, and thus acting as mediators, so to speak, between the secret upspringing purpose and the final accomplishment of crime. It is quite worthy of remark how Buchanan represents their appearance and prophecies to have been he coinage of his dreams; as if his mind were so swollen with ambitious thoughts, that they must needs haunt his pillow and people his sleep; and afterwards, when a part of the dream came to pass without his help, this put him upon working out for himself the fulfilment of the remainder. And in this view of the matter it is not easy to see but that a dream would every way satisfy the moral demands of the case, though it would by no means answer the purposes of the drama.

And the Poet evidently supposes from the first that Macbeth already had the will, and that what he wanted further was an earnest and assurance of success. And it is the ordering of things so as to meet this want, and the tracing of the mental processes and the subtle workings of evil consequent thereon, that renders this drama such a paragon of philosophy organized into art. The Weird Sisters rightly strike the key-note and lead off the terrible chorus, because they embody and realize to us, and even to the hero himself, that secret preparation of evil within him, out of which the whole action proceeds. In their fantastical and unearthly aspect, awakening mingled emotions of terror and mirth, in their mysterious reserve and oracular brevity of speech, so fitted at once to sharpen curiosity and awe down scepticism; in the circumstances of their prophetic greeting, a blasted heath, as a spot sacred to infernal orgies, the influences of the place thus falling in with the preternatural style and matter of their disclosures; in all this we may discern a peculiar aptness to gen erate even in strong minds a belief in their predictions. And such belief, for aught appears, takes hold on Banquo equally as on Macbeth; yet the only effect thereof in the former is to test

and approve his virtue. He sees and hears them with simple wonder; has no other interest in them than that of a natural and innocent curiosity; questions them merely with a view to learn what they are, not to draw out further promises; remains calm, collected, and perfectly planless, his thoughts being wholly taken up with what is before him; and because he sees nothing of himself in them, and has no germs of wickedness for them to work upon, therefore he "neither begs nor fears their favours nor their hate." Macbeth, on the other hand, kindles and starts at their words, his heart leaps forth to catch what they say, and he is eager and impatient to have them speak further; they seem to mean more than meets the ear, and he craves to hear that meaning expressed in full: all which is because they show him his own mind, and set astir the wicked desires his breast is teeming with: his mind all at once becomes strangely introversive, self-occupied, and absent from what is before him, "that he seems rapt withal;' and afterwards, as soon as his ear is saluted with a partial fulfilment of their promise, he forthwith gets lost in thought, and shudders and goes into an ecstasy of terror at the horrid suggestions awakened within him, and his shuddering at them is even because of his yielding to them.

us,

It is observable that Macbeth himself never thinks of making the Weird Sisters anywise responsible for his acts or intentions. The workings of his mind all along manifestly infer that he feels himself just as free to do right, and therefore just as guilty in doing wrong, as if no supernatural soliciting had come near him. He therefore never offers to soothe his conscience or satisfy his reason on the score of his being drawn or urged on by any fatal charm or fascination of hell; it being no less clear to him than to that whatsoever of such mighty magic there may be in the prophetic greeting is all owing to his own moral predisposition. For, in truth, the promise of the throne by the Weird Sisters, how firmly soever believed in, is no more an instigation to murder for it, than a promise of wealth in like sort would be to steal. To a truly just and virtuous man such a promise, in so far as he had faith therein, would preclude the motives to theft; his argument would be, that inasmuch as he was fated to be rich he had nothing to do but wait for the riches to come. If, however, he were already a thief at heart, and kept from stealing only by fear of the consequences, he would be apt to construe the promise of wealth into a promise of impunity in theft. Which appears to strike something near the difference between Banquo and Macbeth; for, in effect, with Banquo the prophetic words preclude, but with Macbeth themselves become, the motives o crime. So much for the origin of the murderous purpose, and the agency of the Weird Sisters in bringing it to a head.

Henceforth Macbeth's doubts and difficulties, his shrinkings and misgivings, spring from the peculiar structure and movement of his intellect, as sympathetically inflamed and wrought upon by the

poison of meditated guilt. His whole state of man suffers an insurrection; conscience forthwith sets his understanding and imagination into morbid, irregular, convulsive action, insomuch that the former disappears in the tempestuous agitations of thought which itself stirs up: his will is buffeted and staggered with prudential reasonings and fantastical terrors, both of which are selfgenerated out of his disordered and unnatural state of mind Here begins his long and fatal course of self-delusion. He misderives his scruples, misplaces his apprehensions, mistranslates the whispers and writhings of conscience into the suggestions of prudence, the forecastings of reason, the threatenings of danger. His strong and excitable imagination, set on fire of conscience, fascinates and spell-binds the other faculties, and so gives an objective force and effect to its internal workings. Under this guilt-begotten hallucination, " present fears are less than horrible imaginings." Thus, instead of acting directly in the form of remorse, conscience comes to act circuitously through imaginary terrors, which again react on the conscience, as fire is kept burning by the current of air which itself generates. Hence his apparent freedom from compunctious visitings even when he is really most subject to them. It is probably from oversight of this that some have set him down as a timid, cautious, remorseless villain, withheld from crime only by a shrinking, selfish apprehensiveness. He does indeed seem strangely dead to the guilt and morbidly alive to the dangers of his enterprise; free from remorses of conscience, and filled with imaginary fears: but whence his uncontrollable irritability of imagination? how comes it that his mind so swarms with horrible imaginings, but that his imagination itself is set on fire of hell? So that he seems remorseless, because in his mind the agonies of remorse project and translate themselves into the spectres of a conscience-stricken imagination.

His conscience thus acting, as it were, in disguise and masquer ade, the natural effect at first is, to make him wavering and irresolute the harrowings of guilty fear have a certain prospective and preventive operation, causing him to recoil, he scarce knows why, from the work he has in hand. So that he would never be able to go through, but for the coming in of a partner and help. meet in the wicked purpose. But afterwards, the first crime hav ing passed from prospect into retrospect, the self-same working of conscience has the effect of goading and hurrying him on from crime to crime. He still mistakes his inward pangs for outward perils: guilt peoples his whereabout with fantastical terrors, which in seeking to beat down he only multiplies. Amidst his efforts to dissimulate he loses his self-control, and spills the awful secret he s trying to hide; and in giving others cause to suspect him, he makes himself cause to suspect them. Thus his cowardice of conscience urges him on to fresh murders, and every murder but adds to that cowardice; the very blood which he spills to quiet