put to death all who fell into their hands. Duncan hastened to oppose them with the best forces he could muster, with Macbeth and Banquo as his seconds-in-command, and gave the Danes battle near a place called Culcross, in which, however, he was defeated, though the victory was so dearly bought by the enemy that they could not follow it up, and so suffered the Scottish king to retreat to Perth, whilst he sent Macbeth to raise a fresh army. In the interval the Danes laid siege to Perth, where they were opposed with such vigour by Duncan and Banquo, that they made but little progress, and were at last, from want of provisions, forced to make overtures for peace, begging that the pressing necessities of their army might be relieved from the besieged town, where there was abundance of food. The Scots took advantage of this, and when they sent them food contrived a barbarous stratagem, whereby all the Danes might easily be cut off. In the liquors which they conveyed to them they mixed a quantity of soporific herbs, by which they were stupified; when Macbeth and Banquo broke into their camp, and they became an easy prey to an indiscriminate slaughter, Sweyn himself escaping with one single ship to Norway. And though soon after the Danes again made a descent upon the Scottish coast, they were once more entirely routed by Macbeth and Banquo, and betook themselves again to their country, after obtaining with difficulty leave to bury their slain at "Saint Colmes' inch," a small island in the Forth, where the mound or "barrow" which they threw up is, we are told, still to be seen. It is with these victories over the rebels and over the Danes, which, however, he varies in some of their details, and which, using a poet's license, he describes as happening almost at the same time, that Shakspeare opens his tragedy of Macbeth.

Macbeth's great success in the field began to make him think that he was too good for the inferior situation of a subject and a general to that king whom his prowess had in great measure retained upon the throne; and such thoughts, encouraged, moreover, as it is said, by certain persons who pretended to know futurity, gave birth to that wickedness for which he is so well known to posterity. Being once more in a tranquil state, Duncan began to turn his attention to bettering the condition of his people, by reforming their manners and strictly administering justice; but whilst he was thus employed, Macbeth was diligent in compassing the completion of the plot which he had devised against his life and for the usurpation of his throne. And in this he was not without a zealous adviser and instigator in the person of his wife, who, besides motives of ambition, added those of revenge; for she was the daughter of Kenneth IV., who had been killed by Malcolm II., the grandfather of Duncan. The deed which this wicked pair had thus resolved on was perpetrated, according to Shakspeare, at Macbeth's castle, near Inverness, though other writers assert that Bathgowanan, near Elgin, was the scene of the assassination of Duncan. The murdered king left two sons, named Malcolm and Donald, of whom the former fled to Cumberland, whilst the latter found safety in the western islands; and there being now no obstacle in the way of the accomplishment of his ambition, Macbeth took possession of the crown of Scotland.

For some time he ruled with sufficient moderation and prudence, but at length, as is usually the case with usurpers, he became oppressive and tyrannical. He hated his former companion in arms, Banquo, and lest the prediction, which promised his posterity the throne of Scotland, should be fulfilled, he resolved to murder him and his children; and this he accomplished, one son alone of his victim escaping the slaughter of his brethren and of his father. It has been, however, supposed by some writers, that the murder of Banquo and the escape of Fleance is entirely a creation of Shakspeare's imagination; and that it was inserted by him in the drama in order to flatter James I., in whose reign it was written, by representing Fleance as the forefather of the house of Stewart.

However, assuming the common account to be true, no sooner had he put one rival out of the way than another appeared, who gave him equal grounds for apprehension; and so, if he would be secure, he must add sin to sin, till the measure of his iniquity was filled. This new terror arose from the great power and influence of Macduff, whom, therefore, lest he should either make himself king, or restore the banished son of Duncan, Macbeth determined to destroy. When apprised of this, Macduff fled to France; and the tyrant, enraged at being thus foiled, wreaked his vengeance on his wife and children, by murdering them all and confiscating his estate. Thus cruelly injured, Macduff vowed to be revenged, and to this end encouraged Malcolm to try to dethrone the usurper, and assisted him in his attempt by his own vassals. They invaded Scotland, and were met by Macbeth with a large army, which, however, they put to the rout, and drove Macbeth himself into the highlands, in whose impregnable fastnesses he contrived to defend himself during two years. In the mean time Malcolm was acknowledged king of Scotland, and crowned at Scone, then and for many centuries after the famous place for the coronation of the Scotch monarchs. Macbeth's life now drew to a close; he made a sally from one of his hidingplaces, and was slain by Macduff, at Lumphanan, at the end of the year 1056, after an usurped reign of seventeen years.

The tragedy which Shakspeare has founded upon these events has been considered, and perhaps not unjustly, as the highest effort of his genius and some commentators have not hesitated to assign it the very first place amongst the dramatic compositions which the world has ever produced; and, indeed, this praise, great as it may at first seem, appears not undeserved when we look into the principal character of the play; and that character, wonderfully as it is portrayed, is but a fair sample of the rest. Is it possible for us to conceive anything more complete, more grand, more consistent, more original in all its parts, than the character of Macbeth? It is a true creation of a poet; nothing is copied; it stands before us in all its most perfect unity and originality. Macbeth is a hero; he fights for his king and for his country; he is great and good at first; and yet, good and great as he, and such as he, may be, he may still fall. And how? In no common way; the ordinary temptations to wickedness do not touch him; and so the poet brings in the powers of the unseen world to tempt him, and that through his

weakest point, through his ambition. Hell on the one side, and his fiend-like wife on the other, seize upon and attack this most assailable part; and the good subject, the great general, the loving relative, commits a sin from which at first he started in dismay, even when it was barely thought of; and thus a catastrophe is produced which may well be considered the most awful in the pages of dramatic literature. And all this is conducted, notwithstanding the supernatural agency introduced, just as the most orthodox divine would wish. We are all tried by temptations; yet not so that we need necessarily fall, except by our own consent and by yielding to our trials; if our own will be not privy to our fall, we may resist the sorest temptations. But if we once give way, if our volition yield to "the tempting of evil;" then is there a traitor in the citadel, and it will be taken, when otherwise it might have defied the strongest assaults of the enemy. And this is just the case with Macbeth; wickedness indeed, both human and diabolical, is leagued against him, yet not so that they need lead him captive, unless he turn traitor to his own cause.

And this struggle between Macbeth's sense of right and wrong, and his ambition, prompting him to deeds of atrocious perfidy and sin, give full scope to the poet to describe the strongest passions which agitate the human heart. He is brave, loyal, gentle; even his ambition has no illness attending it; but in an evil hour he gives heed to the suggestions of the wicked one, and then the struggle begins. There is gratitude towards his sovereign, love for his kinsman, hospitality towards his guest on the one hand; and there is ambition, avarice, love of himself, and pride, on the other. And yet, even in such a case, all might have ended on the right side, had he not abandoned himself by supposing that he was fated, according to the prediction of the witches, a prediction fulfilled in two respects and in one point only waiting for its perfect completion, to perpetrate a deed which would place him at the summit of his highest aspirations. But this is not all which he has to contend with: the ferocious and sarcastic eloquence of Lady Macbeth, that woman who

"Had given suck; and knew

How tender 'tis to love the babe.

Yet would, while it was smiling in her face,

Have pluck'd her nipple from his boneless gums,

And dash'd the brains out, had she so sworn,

As he had done to this;"

her taunting speech comes in to aid the evil side, and he is entirely overcome, and falls into the snare which is spread for him.

And then, in how masterly a way is depicted the rising again, after the accomplishment of the fatal deed, of those good principles which had slumbered awhile in the murderer's bosom, and which, however, can now avail nought, except to excite harrowing remorse and sorrow for his sin, but a sorrow which leads not to repentance. One sin is committed, one murder done, and then there follows the dread of punishment, and this produces cruelty, and tyranny, and oppression; and then, now that, as he thought, all is obtained, there yet remains anxiety, ambitious jealousy, and a fear lest others should do as he

has done. And so another murder must be committed; Banquo, his former companion, and all his race, must perish, because he seems likely hereafter to shake and overturn the throne which Macbeth has raised. And now the change is complete; instead of the brave soldier, we have the cruel tyrant; instead of the loyal subject, the treacherous usurper,-grasping all, daunted at no atrocity, sweeping everything from his way which he suspects may injure him; adding murder to murder, hourly becoming more wretched and more deeply sunk in depravity, with his life a burthen to him, and yet anticipating the close of that life with the utmost horror and dismay.

Still, even to the last the unity of the character is maintained. The Macbeth who has murdered, is no other than the Macbeth who once fought for his country and his king. Changed, indeed, he is; but only as any man must change who abandons himself systematically to do wickedness. He is at the close of the drama just what one would be who had done what he has done, and who had endured what he has endured. There is still in him promptness, but now not to serve his country, but to take vengeance on his rivals and on those who had been his friends; there is still courage, but now in as bad a cause as it had once been displayed in a good. Even when quite sure that Macduff must be the appointed instrument of his final punishment, he still does not yield pusillanimously, but fights bravely, though hopelessly, even as he had done at the beginning of his career, when attacked at the same time by the rebels, and by the foreign host of invaders.

It is well known that Shakspeare has been censured most gravely for neglecting what critics call" the unity of time." In none of his dramas does he offend, if it be an offence, on this head more than he does in Macbeth; for no less than seventeen years are taken up with the action of the drama, from its first scene to its close. And yet it is herein that he has shown his consummate skill, and proved that true genius will not be shackled by any obsolete rules, which, however they may have been needed in the classical theatre, are not required in the modern. Wonderful, indeed, is the tact with which he has condensed into one representation the extensive series of events of which this tragedy is composed. One of the greatest of the Greek dramatists, and the boldest, has taken three plays wherein to describe a chain of facts similar to that which Shakspeare has done in one. The trilogy of Eschylus, comprising his Agamemnon, Choephora, and Eumenides, has often been compared with the Macbeth of our poet, but to the manifest advantage of the latter. But we will let the eloquent words of the modern Aristotle, the German critic Schlegel, vindicate the cause of our drama: "This drama, it is true," he remarks, "comprehends a considerable period of time: but, in the rapidity of its progress, have we leisure to calculate this? We see, as it were, the Fates weaving their dark web on the bosom of time; and the storm and whirlwind of events, which impel the hero to the first daring attempt, which afterwards lead him to commit innumerable crimes to secure the fruits of it, and drive him at last, amidst numerous perils, to his destruction in the heroic combat, draw us irresistibly along with them. Such a tragical exhibition resembles

the course of a comet, which, hardly visible at first, and only important to the astronomic eye when appearing in the heaven in a nebulous distance, soon soars with an unheard-of and perpetually increasing rapidity toward the central point of our system, spreading dismay among the nations of the earth, till in a moment, with its portentous tail, it overspreads the half of the firmament with flaming fire."

One thing in this tragedy we must not neglect to notice; it is the "supernatural machinery," as it has been called, upon which it turns in almost all its parts. At the time that Shakspeare lived, there was a general belief prevalent in England, not then so sceptical as now, in the existence of witchcraft. Whether he himself was a profound believer in it or not, cannot perhaps be known, nor is it worth while to inquire. It is not likely, however, that he would let slip such means of engaging his readers' attention, with which the universal opinion supplied him. With his peculiar characteristic, he seized upon that which the age in which he lived presented to him, and worked it into his drama, to serve the one great end of his writing, namely, that of describing men as they are, and agitated with their natural passions. Had Shakspeare lived in our own time, he might have hesitated before he adopted in his plays that belief, which, whatever might be his opinion, the majority of his readers would jeer at. But, in his day, the contrary was the case; the introduction of spirits of the air into "The Tempest," the description of the gambols of the fairy elves in "The Midsummer Night's Dream," the terrific picture of the incantations, and the forebodings of the witches in Macbeth; all this would excite no sceptical criticism amongst those who were not unused to be told, even from the pulpit, that "witches and sorcerers within these last few years were marvellously increased within the queen's realm ;" and when no less than seventeen or eighteen persons were condemned for witchcraft in one small parish in Essex at one time. It should be remembered, too, that Macbeth was written during the reign of King James I., and that it is not unlikely that it suggested itself to the writer as being a subject, from its Scotch origin, that would commend itself to the royal taste. There are not wanting proofs that such was the case; passages may be cited which were intended, and innocently enough, to flatter the monarch's vanity; of this kind is the making Fleance, the son of Banquo, the forefather of the Stewart dynasty; and in the witches' cave, the long line of kings from Banquo, and the vision of some "that two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry," may be well supposed to have been introduced for the same reason. Now, it is well known that king James was a profound believer in witchcraft and sorcery; that he not unfrequently presided in person at the trial of those accused of that sin, and that he actually published a work on Dæmonologie, in which he tells his reader that there is a "fearefull abounding at this time in this countrey of those detestable slaves of the devil, witches or enchanters." Is it,

(1) These are the words of Bishop Jewel, when preaching before Queen Elizabeth in the year 1558.