THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. T HIS piece is perhaps one of the greatest exertions of the tragic and poetic powers, that any age, or any country has produced. Here are opened new fources of terror, new creations of fancy. The agency of Witches and Spirits excites a fpecies of terror, that cannot be effected by the operation of human agency, or by any form or difpofition of human things. For the known limits of their powers and сараcities fet certain bounds to our apprehenfions; mysterious horrors, undefined terrors, are raised by the intervention of beings, whose nature we do not understand, whofe actions we cannot control, and whose influence influence we know not how to escape. Here we feel through all the faculties of the foul, and to the utmost extent of her capacity. The dread of the interpofition of fuch agents is the most falutary of all fears. It keeps up in our minds a sense of our connection with awful and invisible spirits, to whom our most secret actions are apparent, and from whofe chastisement, Innocence alone can defend us. From many dangers Power will protect; many crimes may be concealed by Art and Hypocrify; but when fupernatural Beings arife, to reveal, and to avenge, Guilt blushes through her mask, and trembles behind her bulwarks. Shakespear has been fufficiently justified, by the best critics, for availing himself of the popular faith in witchcraft; and he is certainly as defenfible in this point, as Euripides, and other Greek tragedians, for introducing Jupiter, Diana, Minerva, &c. whose personal intervention, in the events exhibited on their stage, had not obtained more credit, with the thinking and the philofophical part of the fpectators, than tales of Witchcraft Witchcraft among the Wife and Learned here. Much later than the age in which Macbeth lived, even in Shakespear's own time, there were fevere ftatutes extant against Witchcraft. Some objections have been made to the Hecate of the Greeks being joined to the witches of our country. Milton, a more correct writer, has often mixed the Pagan deities, even with the most facred characters of our religion. Our Witches power was fuppos'd to be exerted only in little and low mischief: this therefore being the only example where their interpofition is recorded, in the revolutions of a kingdom, the Poet thought, perhaps, that the story would pafs off better, with the Learned at leaft, if he added the celebrated Hecate to the weird fifters; and fhe is introduced, chiding their prefumption, for trading in prophecies and affairs of death. The dexterity is admirable, with which the predictions of the witches (as Macbeth obferves) prove true to the Ear, but falfe to the Hope, M |