the account of this play from which we have already made one quotation, adopts Lamb's view of the relation between Macbeth and the witches, as expressed in one of the notes to his 'Specimens of Early Dramatic Poetry.' Shakespeare's witches," says Lamb, speaking of them in comparison with those of Middleton (that is, comparing two things between which there is neither affinity nor analogy), "originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination."

Yet the prophetic words in which the attainment of royalty is promised him, contain not the remotest hint as to the means by which he is to arrive at it. They are simply—

All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter;

an announcement which, it is plain, should have rather inclined a man who was not already harbouring a scheme of guilty ambition, to wait quietly the course of events, saying to himself, as even Macbeth observes, while ruminating on this prediction,—

If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.

So that, according to Macbeth's own admission, the words of the weird sisters on this occasion convey anything rather than an incitement to murder to the mind of a man who is not meditating it already. "This supernatural soliciting" is only made such to the mind of Macbeth by the fact that he is already occupied with a purpose of assassination. This is the true answer to the question which he here puts to himself:

Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings!

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother'd in surmise; and nothing is,
But what is not!

How, then, does Macbeth really stand before us at the very opening of the drama? We see in him a near kinsman of "the gracious Duncan," occupying the highest place in the favour and confidence of his king and relative,-a warrior of the greatest prowess, employed in suppressing a dangerous rebellion and repelling a foreign invader, aided also by the treachery of that thane of Cawdor whose forfeited honours the grateful king bestows on his successful general. Yet all the while this man, so actively engaged in putting down other traitors, cherishes against his king, kinsman, and benefactor, a purpose of tenfold blacker treason than any of those against which he has been defending him—the purpose, not suggested to him by any one, but gratuitously and deliberately formed within his own breast, of murdering his royal kinsman with his own hand, in order, by that means, to usurp his crown. With every motive to loyalty and to gratitude, yet his lust of power is so eager and so inordinate, as to overcome every opposing consideration of honour, principle, and feeling. To understand aright the true spirit and moral of this great tragedy, it is most important that the reader or auditor should be well impressed at the outset with the conviction how bad a man, independently of all instigation from others, Macbeth must have been, to have once conceived such a design under such peculiar circumstances.

The first thing that strikes us in such a character is, the intense selfishness-the total absence both of sympathetic feeling and moral principle, and the consequent incapability of remorse in the proper sense of the term. So far from finding any check to his design in the fact that the king bestows on him the forfeited title of the traitorous thane of Cawdor as an especial mark of confidence in his loyalty, this only serves to whet his own villanous purpose. The dramatist has brought this forcibly home to us, by one of his master-strokes of skill, in the passage where he makes Macbeth first enter the king's presence at

the very moment when the latter is reflecting on the repentant end of the executed thane:

The sin of my ingratitude even now
Was heavy on me. Thou art so far before,
That swiftest wing of recompense is slow

To overtake thee. Would thou hadst less deserv'd,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine!-only I have left to say,
More is thy due than more than all can pay.
Macb. The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your highness' part
Is to receive our duties: and our duties

Are, to your throne and state, children and servants;
Which do but what they should, by doing everything
Safe toward your love and honour.

Dun.

Welcome hither:

I have begun to plant thee, and will labour

To make thee full of growing.

From hence to Inverness,

And bind us further to you.

Macb. The rest is labour, which is not us'd for you;
I'll be myself the harbinger, and make joyful

The hearing of my wife with your approach;

So, humbly take my leave.

Dun.

My worthy Cawdor!

Stars, hide your fires!

[Exit.

Let not light see my black and deep desires:

The eye wink at the hand! yet let that be,

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

Dun. True, worthy Banquo; he is full so valiant;

And in his commendations I am fed;

It is a banquet to me.

Let us after him,

Whose care is gone before to bid us welcome:

It is a peerless kinsman !

Here, surely, is a depth of cold-blooded treachery which is truly immeasurable-seeing that the " peerless kinsman" is really gone before to "make joyful the hearing of his wife" with the news that they are to have immediately the wished-for opportunity of

murdering their worthy kinsman and sovereign. It is from no "compunctious visiting of nature," but from sheer moral cowardice-from fear of retribution in this life—that we find Macbeth shrinking, at the last moment, from the commission of this enormous crime. This will be seen the more, the more attentively we consider his soliloquy :—

If it were done when 'tis done, then 't were well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time—
We'd jump the life to come. But, in these cases,
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.- -He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bare the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels trumpet-tongu’d, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim hors'd
Upon the sightless coursers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind.

Again, to Lady Macbeth :

We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,

Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,

Not cast aside so soon.

In all this we trace a most clear consciousness of the impossibility that he should find of masking his guilt from the public eye, the odium which must consequently fall upon him in the opinions of men,and the retribution which it would probably bring upon him. But here is no evidence of true moral repugnance and as little of any religious scruple

We'd jump the life to come.

The dramatist, by this brief but significant parenthesis, has taken care to leave us in no doubt on a point so momentous towards forming a due estimate of the conduct of his hero. However, he feels, as we see, the dissuading motives of worldly prudence in all their force. But one devouring passion urges him on-the master-passion of his life—the lust of power: I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent; but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls, &c.

Still, it should seem that the considerations of policy and safety regarding this life might ever have withheld him from the actual commission of the murder, had not the spirit of his wife come in to fortify his failing purpose. At all events, in the action of the drama it is her intervention, most decidedly, that terminates his irresolution, and urges him to the final perpetration of the crime which he himself had been the first to meditate. It therefore becomes necessary to consider Lady Macbeth's own character in its leading peculiarities.

It has been customary to talk of Lady Macbeth as of a woman in whom the love of power for its own sake not only predominates over, but almost excludes, every human affection, every sympathetic feeling. But the more closely the dramatic developement of this character is examined, the more fallacious, we believe, this view of the matter will be found. Had Shakespeare intended so to represent her, he would probably have made her the first contriver of the assassination scheme. For our own part, we regard the very passage which has commonly been quoted as decisive that personal and merely selfish ambition is her all-absorbing motive, as proving in reality quite the contrary. It is true that even Coleridge* desires us to remark that, in her opening scene, "she evinces

* 'Literary Reinains,' vol. ii. p. 244.