trasted with his own want of masculine self-possession, he exclaims

Bring forth men-children only!

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males !

He eagerly seizes and improves her suggestion :

Will it not be receiv'd

When we have mark'd with blood those sleepy two
Of his own chamber, and us'd their very daggers—
That they have done 't?

Lady M.

Who dares receive it other,

As we shall make our griefs and clamour roar
Upon his death?

Macb.

I am settled, and bend up

Each corporal agent to this terrible feat!—

Away, and mock the time with fairest show

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

66

That "courage" of his which not even her logic and her sarcasm combined could quite screw to the sticking-place," wavers no longer, now that he feels assured of making others bear the imputation of his crime.

Still, he expects to be supported, in the act of murder, by her personal participation:-"When we have marked with blood those sleepy two ... and used their very daggers," &c. But, notwithstanding her invocation to the spirits of murder to fill her, "from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty;" -notwithstanding her assurance to Macbeth

I have given suck; and know

How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn,
As you have done to this ;-

yet when she has "drugged the possets of the chamberlains, and "laid their daggers ready," we find her own hand shrinking at the last moment from the act which she had certainly sworn to herself to perform, and that from one of those very

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punctious visitings of nature which she had so awfully deprecated in herself,-awakened, too, by an image which, however tender, is less pathetic to her woman's contemplation than the one presented by that extreme case which her last-cited speech supposes :

Had he not resembled

My father as he slept, I had done 't.

So strong, after all, is "the milk of human kindness" against the fire of human passion and the iron of human will! And thus the sole performance of the murder still devolves upon the wicked but irresolute hand of the original assassin, Macbeth himself.

He has time, while waiting for the fatal summons which she is to give by striking on the bell, for one more "horrible imagining:"

Is this a dagger which I see before me? &c.

There's no such thing:

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes!

And no sooner is this vision dissipated, than his restless imagination runs on to picture most poetically the sublime horror of the present occasion :

Now o'er the one half world

Nature seems dead, &c.

The sound of the bell dismisses him from these horrible fancies, to that which, to his mind, is the less horrible fact: :

I go, and it is done, &c.

It is done, indeed. But the "horrible imaginings of his anticipation are trivial compared to those which instantly spring from his ruminations on the perpetrated act:

Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more, &c.

Sleep no more.-These brief words involve, we shall see, the whole history of our hero's subsequent career.

2.-MACBETH AND LADY MACBETH, AFTER THE MURDER

OF DUNCAN.

IN proceeding to consider the second grand phasis in the mutual developement of these remarkable characters, it is most important that we should not mistake the nature of Macbeth's nervous perturbation while in the very act of consummating his first great crime.

The more closely we examine it, the more we shall find it to be devoid of all genuine compunction. This character, as we have said before, is one of intense selfishness, and is therefore incapable of any true moral repugnance to inflicting injury upon others: it shrinks only from encountering public odium, and the retribution which that may produce. Once persuaded that these will be avoided, Macbeth falters not in proceeding to apply the dagger to the throat of his sleeping guest. But here comes the display of the other part of his character,-that extreme nervous irritability which, combined with active intellect, produces in him so much highly poetical rumination, and at the same time, being unaccompanied with the slightest portion of self-command, subjects him to such signal moral cowardice. We feel bound the

more earnestly to solicit the reader's attention to this distinction, since, though so clearly evident when once pointed out, it has escaped the penetration of some even of the most eminent critics. The poetry delivered by Macbeth, let us repeat, is not the poetry inspired by a glowing or even a feeling heart-it springs exclusively from a morbidly irritable fancy. We hesitate not to say, that his wife mistakes, when she apprehends that "the milk of human kindness" will prevent him from "catching the nearest way.' The fact is that, until after the famous banquet scene,

as we shall have to shew in detail, she mistakes his character throughout. She judges of it too much from her own. Possessing generous feeling herself, she is susceptible of remorse. Full of self-control, and afflicted with no feverish imagination, she is dismayed by no vague apprehensions, no fantastic fears. Consequently, when her husband is withheld from his crime simply by that dread of contingent consequences which his fancy so infinitely exaggerates, she, little able to conceive of this, naturally ascribes some part of his repugnance to that "milk of human kindness," those "compunctious visitings of nature," of which she can conceive.

This double opposition between the two characters is yet more strikingly and admirably shown in the dialogue between them which immediately follows the murder. The perturbation which seizes Macbeth the instant he has struck the fatal blow, springs not, we repeat, from the slightest consideration for his victim. It is but the necessary recoil in the mind of every moral coward, upon the final performance of any decisive act from which accumulating selfish apprehensions have long withheld him, heightened and exaggerated by that excessive morbid irritability which, after his extreme selfishness, forms the next great moral characteristic of Macbeth. It is the sense of all the possible consequences to himself, and that alone, which rushes instantly and overwhelmingly upon his excitable fancy, so as to thunder its denunciations in his very ears :—

Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep-the innocent sleep-
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,"

Still it cried, "Sleep no more!" to all the house;
"Glamis hath murder'd sleep; and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!"

This fancied voice it is, that scares him from the scene of blood, and from taking the concerted pre

caution for throwing the imputation upon Duncan's chamberlains, not any compunction whatever as to implicating them in the assassination. "Function is smothered in surmise." His instant alarms for himself overpoweringly engross him. He listens at every chamber door as he withdraws,-until, finding himself, for the moment, safe from discovery, he lapses into his ill-timed rumination upon the nature and circumstances of the act he has just committed, which touch his fearful fancy vividly enough, but his heart not at all.

On the other hand, it is interesting to see how Lady Macbeth takes to heart, as he delivers them, the considerations which are suggested to his mind by his selfish fears alone. Impressed with the erroneous notion, drawn from the consciousness within her own breast, that he suffers real remorse, she at first endeavours to divert him from his reflections by assuming a tone of cool indifference. To his first exclamation, "This is a sorry sight!" she answers, "A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight." And when he goes on- "There's one did laugh in his sleep, and one cried, Murder!"" she merely observes, "There are two lodged together." But when, still running on, he says,

Listening their fear, I could not say, amen,
When they did say, God bless us,-

she, interpreting as words of compunction the mere effusion of his selfish apprehensions, is moved to say, "Consider it not so deeply." And when his runaway imagination, merely urged on by her attempts to check its career, has rejoined—

But wherefore could not I pronounce amen?
I had most need of blessing, and amen

Stuck in my throat,—

his selfish distress is still mistaken by her for remorse, and felt so keenly, as to make her exclaim—

These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad!