pressively shewn. Even the stings of conscience, if not blunted, can for a time be averted, by that busy march of affairs, which attracts all the attention outwardly, and throws the faculty of reflection into disuse.

The rapid deterioration of Macbeth's moral nature deserves notice. The murder of the king, to which he had the greatest temptation, was effected in the midst of a storm of conscientious rebuke. The murder of Banquo was attended with no expression of remorse, although it highly stimulated the imagination; for this also he had temptation. But shortly afterwards we find him committing a wholesale and motiveless deed of blood, in the assassination of the kindred of Macduff-far more atrocious and horrible, if there can be degrees in the guilt of such deeds, than all he has done before. At first we find him "infirm of purpose" in guilt. Referring either to his want of sleep or to his hallucination, he says:

'My strange and self-abuse

Is the initiate fear, that wants hard use :-
We are yet but young in deeds."

Afterwards he becomes indeed "bloody, bold, and resolute;" and he orders the massacre of Macduff's kindred without hesitation or compunction.

"From this moment

The very firstlings of my heart shall be

The firstlings of my hand. And even now,

To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done; The castle of Macduff I will surprise;

Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do before this purpose cool."

Subsequently to this foul deed, the tyrant supported his power with many acts of sudden and bloody violence: for, notwithstanding the great rapidity of action in the drama, an interval in reality of some years must be supposed between the first and last acts, during which time

"Each new morn,

New widows howl; new orphans cry; new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face."

See also the fine description of the country under the tyrant's sway given by Rosse:

"The dead man's knell

Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken."

The change in Macbeth's nervous system, from its early sensibility, when he was young in deeds of guilt, to the obtuseness brought on by hard use, is later in the piece described by himself:

66

Seyton. It is the cry of women, my good lord.
Macbeth. I have almost forgot the taste of fears:
The time has been, my senses would have quail'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.-Wherefore was that cry?
Sey. The queen, my lord, is dead."

To'the last, the shadow of madness is most skilfully indicated as hovering around Macbeth, without the reality actually falling upon him. When finally brought to bay in his stronghold, the opinion of his madness is positively expressed:

"Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies :

Some say he's mad; others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury: but, for certain,

He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause
Within the belt of rule."

The cause of his reputed madness is conscience.

"Who then shall blame

His pester'd senses to recoil and start,

When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there ?"

The defiant fierceness of his resistance is not within the belt of rule. He'll fight till from his bones the flesh is hacked; put on his armour before 'tis needed;

"Send out more horses; skirr the country round; Hang those that talk of fear."

But with all this valiant fury, he is sick at heart, oppressed with profound weariness of life: "I'gin to be a-weary of the sun.” What exquisite pathos in

the melancholy passages:

"My way of life

Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."

And in this, so Hamlet like:

>

"She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

When all hope has fled, his superabundant activity rejects the very idea of self-destruction. He will not play the Roman fool, and die on his own sword. Gashes look best on others. In the last scene, in which the lying juggle of the fiend is unmasked, and he falls by the sword of Macduff, some remaining touches of conscience and of nature are shewn. At first he refuses to fight:

"My soul is too much charged With blood of thine already."

When even fate deserts him, and his better part of man is cowed, he fights bravely to the last, and falls in a manner which the poet takes care to mark, in the scene which immediately follows, as the honourable end of a soldier's life. He descends from the light a fearful example of a noble mind, depraved by yielding to the tempter; a terrible evidence of the fires of hell lighted in the breast of a living man by his own

act.

D

The character of Lady Macbeth is less interesting to the psychological student than that of her husband. It is far less complex; drawn with a classic simplicity of outline, it presents us with none of those balancing and contending emotions which make the character of Macbeth so wide and varied a field of study. It does not come within the scope of this criticism to enquire at length into the relative degree of wickedness and depravity exhibited by the two great criminals. Much ingenious speculation has been expended on this subject, one upon which writers are never likely entirely to agree so long as different people have antipathies and preferences for different forms of character. The first idea of the crime undoubtedly comes into the mind of Macbeth before he sees his wife; the suggestion of it fills his mind immediately after his interview with the weird Sisters, and he indicates the strong hold which the horrible imagination takes on him.

"Stars, hide your fires;

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."

But in Macbeth's letter to his wife there is not a word by which the enterprise can be said to be broken to her, and she expresses her own fell purpose before their meeting. At the first moment of their meeting she replies to his assertion, that Duncan. goes hence to-morrow: