his fears sprouting up in "gorgons and chimeras dire" to awaken new fears and call for more victims.

The critics of a certain school have in characteristic fashion found fault with the buddling together and confusion of metaphors, which Macbeth pours forth when his mind is preternaturally beated and wrought up. Doubtless they would have him talk always according to the rules of grammar and rhetoric. Shakespeare was content to let him talk according to his state of mind and the laws of his character. Nor, in this view, could any thing better serve the Poet's purpose, than this preternatural rush and redundancy of imagination, hurrying on from thought to thought, and running and massing a multitude of half-formed images together. And such a cast of mind in the hero was necessary to the health of the drama: otherwise such a manifold tragedy had been in danger of turning out an accumulation of horrors. As it is, the impression is at once softened and deepened, after a style of art which Shakespeare alone could evoke and manage: the terrible is made to tread, sometimes to tremble, on the outmost edge, yet never passes into the horrible; what were else too frightful to be boru being thus kept within the limits of pleasurable emotion. Macbeth's imagination so overwrought and self-accelerating, this it is that glorifies the drama with such an interfusion of tragic terror and lyrical sweetness, and pours over the whole that baptism of terrible beauty which forms its distinctive excellence.

In the structure and working of her mind and moral frame Lady Macbeth is the opposite of her husband, and for that reason all the better fitted to piece out and make up his deficiency. Of a firm, sharp, wiry, matter-of-fact intellect, doubly charged with energy of will she has little in common with him save a red-hot ambition; for which cause, while the prophetic disclosures have the same effect on her will as on his, and she forthwith jumps into the same purpose, the effect on her mind is just the reverse; she being subject to no such involuntary and uncontrollable tumults of thought: without his irritability of understanding and imagination, she therefore has no such prudential misgivings or terrible illusions to make her shake, and falter, and recoil. So that what terrifies him, transports her; what stimulates his reflective powers, stifles hers.

Almost any other dramatist would have brought the Weird Sisters to act immediately upon Lady Macbeth, and through het upon her husband, as thinking her more open to superstitious allurements and charms. Shakespeare seems to have understood that aptness of mind for them to work upon would have unfitted her for working upon her husband in aid of them. Enough of such influence has already been brought to bear what is wanted further is quite another sort of influence; such a sort as could only be wielded by a mind not much accessible to the former. There was strong dramatic reason, therefore, why nothing should

move or impress her, when awake, but facts; why she should not be of a constitution and method of mind, that the evil which has struck its roots so deep within should come back to her in the elements and aspects of nature, either to mature the guilty purpose, or to obstruct the guilty act. It is quite remarkable that she never once recurs to the Weird Sisters, or lays any stress on their salutations: they seem to have no weight with her but for the impression they have made on Macbeth; that which impression may grow to the desired effect she refrains from using it, or meddling with it, and seeks only to fortify it with such other impressions as lie in her power to make. Does not all this look as though she were sceptical touching the contents of his letter, and durst not attempt to influence him with arguments that had no influence with herself, lest her want of sincerity therein should still further unknit his purpose? And what could better set forth her incomparable shrewdness and tact, than that, instead of overstraining this one motive, and thereby weakening it, she should thus let it alone, and endeavour to strengthen it by mixing others with it? Moreover, it does not elude her penetration, that his fears still more than his hopes are wrought up by the preternatural soliciting for the Weird Sisters represent in most appalling sort the wickedness of the purpose which they suggest; and the thought of them scares up a throng of horrid images, and puts him under a fascination of terror: the instant he reverts to them his imagination springs into action, an organ whereof while ambition works the bellows, conscience still governs the stops and keys. So that her surest course is to draw his thoughts off to the natural motives and solicitings of the opportunity that has made itself to his hands: otherwise there is danger that the opportunity will unmake him, for, so long as his mind is taken up with those stimulants of imagination, outward facilities for his purpose augment his inward recoilings from the act.

Coleridge justly remarks upon her consummate art in first urging in favour of the deed those very circumstances which to her husband's conscience plead most movingly against it. That the King has unreservedly cast himself upon their loyalty and hospitality, this she puts forth as the strongest argument for murdering him. An awful stroke of character indeed! and therefore awful, because natural. By thus anticipating his greatest drawpacks, and urging them as the chief incentives, she forecloses all debate, and leaves him nothing to say; which is just what she wants; for she knows well enough that the thing a horrible crime, and will not stand the tests of reason a moment; and therefore that the more he talks the less apt he will be for the work. And throughout this dreadful wrestling-match she surveys the whole ground and darts upon the strongest points with all the quickness and sureness of instinct: her powers of foresight and self-control seem to grow as the horrors thicken; the exigency being to her a sort of practical inspiration. The finishing touch

in this part of the picture is when, her husband's resolution being all in a totter, she boldly cuts the very sinews of retreat by casting the thing into a personal controversy and making it a theme of domestic war, so that he has no way but either to fall in with her leading or else to take her life. To gain the crown she literally hazards all, putting it out of the question for them to live together, unless he do the deed, and thus embattling all the virtues and affections of the husband against the conscience of the man. He accordingly goes about the deed, and goes through it, with an assumed ferocity caught from her.

Nor is it to be supposed that this ferocity is native to her own breast in her case, too, surely it is assumed; for though in her intense overheat of expectant passion it be temporarily fused and absorbed into her character, it is disengaged and thrown off as soon as that heat passes away. Those will readily take our meaning, who have ever seen how, from the excitement of successful effort, men will sometimes pass for a while into and become identified with a character which they undertake to play. And sc Lady Macbeth, for a special purpose, begins with acting a part which is really foreign to her, but which, notwithstanding, such is her iron fixedness of will, she braves out to issues so overwhelming as to make her husband and many others believe it is her own. In herself, indeed, she is a great bad woman whom we fear and pity; yet neither so great nor so bad, we are apt to think, as she is generally represented. She has closely studied her husband. and penetrated far into the heart of his mystery; yet she knows him rather as he is to her than as he is in himself: hence in describing his character she interprets her own, and shows more of the warm-hearted wife than of the cool-headed philosopher. Mr. Verplanck, with great felicity, distinguishes her as "a woman of high intellect, bold spirit, and lofty desires, who is mastered by a fiery thirst for power, and that for her husband as well as herself."

Two very different characters, however, may easily be made out for her, according as we lay the chief stress on what she says, or what she does. For surely none can fail to remark, that the promise of a fiend conveyed in her earlier speeches is by no means made good in her subsequent acts. That Shakespeare well understood the principle whereon Sophocles sprinkled the songs of nightingales amid the grove of the Furies, could not be better shown than in that, when Lady Macbeth looks upon the face of her sleeping Sovereign, at whose heart her steel is aimed, and sees the murderous thought passing, as it were, into a fact before her, a gush of womanly feeling or of native tenderness suddenly stays her uplifted arm. And, again, when she hears from Macbeth how ne has done two more murders to screen the first, she sinks down at the tale, thus showing that the woman she had so fearfully disclaimed has already returned to torment and waste her into the grave. So that the sequel proves her to have been better than she was herself aware; for at first her thoughts were so centred

and nailed to the object she was in quest of, that she had no place for introversion, and did not suspect what fires of hell she was planting in her bosom. In truth, she had undertaken too much: in her efforts to screw her own and her husband's courage to the sticking-place there was exerted a force of will which answered the end indeed, but at the same time cracked the sinews of nature; though that force of will still enables her to hide the dreadful work that is doing within. She has quite as much if not more of conscience than Macbeth; but its workings are retrospective. proceed upon deeds, not thoughts; and she is not so made, she has no such sensitive redundancy of imagination, that conscience should be in her senses, causing the howlings of the storm to syllable the awful notes of remorse. And as her conscience is without an organ to project and body forth its revenges, so she may indeed possess them in secret, but she can never repress them : subject to no fantastical terrors nor moral illusions, she therefore never loses her self-control: the unmitigable corrodings of her rooted sorrow may destroy, but cannot betray her, unless when her energy of will is bound up in sleep. And for the same cause she is free alike from the terrible apprehensions which make her husband flinch from the first crime, and from the maddening and merciless suspicions of guilty fear that lash and spur him on to other crimes. But the truth of her inward state comes out with an awful mingling of pathos and terror, in the scene where her conscience, sleepless amid the sleep of nature, nay, most restless even when all other cares are at rest, drives her forth, open-eyed, yet sightless, to sigh and groan over spots on her hands, that are visible to none but herself, nor even to herself, but when she is blind to every thing else. And what an awful mystery, too, hangs about her death! We know not, the Poet himself seems not to know, whether the gnawings of the undying worm drive her to suicidal violence, or themselves cut asunder the cords of her life. all we know is, that the death of her body springs somehow from the inextinguishable life and the immedicable wound of her soul. What a history of her woman's heart is written in her thus sinking, sinking away whither imagination shrinks from following, under the violence of an invisible yet unmistakable disease, which still sharpens its inflictions and at the same time quickens her sensibility!

This guilty couple are patterns of conjugal virtue. A tender, delicate, respectful affection sweetens and dignifies their intercourse; the effect of which is rather heightened than otherwise by their ambition, because they seem to thirst for each other's honour as much as for their own. And this sentiment of mutual respect even grows by their crimes, since their inborn greatness is developed through them, not buried beneath them. And when they find that the crown, which they have waded through so much blood to grasp, does but scald their brows and stuff their pillow with thorns, this begets a still deeper and finer play of sympathy between

them. Thenceforth, (and how touching its effect!) a soft sabdued undertone of inward sympathetic woe and anguish mingies audibly in the wild rushing of the moral tempest that hangs round their footsteps. Need we add how free they are from any thing little or mean, vulgar or gross? the very intensity of their wicked passion seeming to have assoiled their minds of all such earthy and ignole incumbrances. And so manifest withal is their innate fitness to reign, that their ambition almost passes as the instinct of faculty for its proper sphere.

Dr. Johnson observes with rare infelicity that this play "has no nice discriminations of character." How far from just is this remark, we trust hath already been made clear enough. In this respect the hero and heroine are equalled only by the Poet's other masterpieces, by Shylock, Hamlet, Lear, and Iago; while the Weird Sisters, so seemingly akin (though whether as mothers or sisters, or daughters, we cannot tell) to the thunder-storms that keep them company, occupy the summit of his preternatural creations. Nevertheless it must be owned that the grandeur of the dramatic combination oversways our impression of the individual characters, and, unless we make a special effort that way, prevents a due notice of their merits; that the delicate limning of the agents is apt to be lost sight of in the magnitude, the manifold unity, and thought-like rapidity of the action.

The style of this drama is pitched in the same high tragic key as the action throughout we have an explosion, as of purpose into act, so also of thought into speech, both literally kindling with their own swiftness. No sooner thought than said, no sooner said than done, is everywhere the order of the day. And, there. withal, thoughts and images come crowding and jostling each other in so quick succession that none can gain full utterance, a second still leaping upon the tongue before the first is fairly off. Thus the Poet seems to have endeavoured his utmost how much of meaning could be conveyed in how little of expression; with the least touching of the ear to send vibrations through all the chambers of the mind. Hence the large manifold suggestiveness that lurks in the words; they seem instinct with something which the speakers cannot stay to unfold. And between these invitations to linger and the continual drawings onward, the reader's mind is kindled into an almost preternatural illumination and activity. Doubtless this prolonged stretch and tension of thought would at length grow wearisome, and cause an inward flagging and faintness, but that the play, moreover, is throughout a fierce conflict of antagonist elements and opposite extremes, which are so managed as to brace up the interest on every side; so that the effect of the whole is to refresh, not exhaust the powers, the mind being sustained in its long and lofty flight by the wings that grow forth of their own accord from its superadded life. In general, the lyrical, instead of being interspersed here and there in the form of musical lulls and pauses, is thoroughly interfused with