others with him. Therefore though these others had been planned by him alone, executed by him alone; she shares the guilt of all, because she had been one with him at the turning point of his life. Doubtless Lady Macduff had once been her friend, and she would have shrunk from such a thing as murdering a defenceless woman and her babes. But she does not blame her husband, or excuse herself. She is silent. Her husband can speak more freely of his feelings, act more energetically, throw himself into excitement that can dull thought, and his stronger physical nature is not so overstrained by the burden of a moral conflict. (Her struggles are solitary. Faithful to his interests to the last, she seals her lips, and masks her expression, lest suspicions should arise in her husband's subjects. Her frail frame fails in the double struggle. Her sleep is no longer sleep, but only partial unconsciousness. The thoughts that have burnt into her brain by day, burst forth from her unconscious lips at night. Spite of her determined will she had "thought on these things after these ways, and they had made her MAD!" Most writers think Lady Macbeth devoid of imagination. She has not the concrete, sensuous imagination of the poet, or the artist, or of her husband; she hears no voices, sees no visions. But she has evidently the higher abstract imagination of the thinker and the philosopher. In her last illness, however, her intellectual imagination becomes more concrete, as it is less controlled; more like Macbeth's. She is "Not so sick, my Lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, That keep her from her rest.") The sleeping old man so like her father, with whose blood she bathed the faces of his grooms; the recollection of the part she took in urging his death; the wife of the Thane of Fife? The smell of the blood yet makes her sick heart shrink and faint. Why did her husband see apparitions, and mar all with his starting? Yet her own imaginations wear out her life, as Macbeth's more superficial ones never would have done to him. (Poor Lady Macbeth. One feels a strange longing that there should have been some sign of hope and pity and pardon, for her dark death bed. Was there nothing

but Cain's curse in the air? Was there no ghostly help, when ghostly horrors came and went? Is remorse never repentance ? Her doctor could

"Not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,"

but was there no physician to bring the Balm of Gilead that could heal even the chief of sinners ? the play is silent.

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The Queen, my Lord, is dead! And her women weep and wail, her husband moralises, and the world is far away. She has judged herself severely and condemned herself hardly, and there rises to my mind a sentence like this: "If ye would judge yourselves, ye would not be judged!"-" So may she rest, her faults lie gently on her!

"She should have died hereafter," said her husband, for he was left alive. Betrayed by the juggling fiends, deserted by all else, with a final outburst of his old warrior self, Macbeth dies too.

Lastly, let us look at Lady Macbeth's crime. Murder is fortunately a comparatively rare crime, and few of us are tempted to it. It is quite right and just that it should be reckoned the capital crime, for the safety of the individual and of the State. But is it not also conceivable that, except when it is an outcome of a general moral leprosy, murder in itself should not deteriorate a character so much as many lesser crimes. It carries with it its own retribution, Eugene Aram can tell us that. "He that hateth his brother is a murderer," says Holy Writ. The sin, therefore, lies in the hale. The sudden blow of murder, an act in one moment of passion-blurred time, makes irrevocable the hate which is the murder, but if the blow misses is not the man forgiven? The murderer does not even wrong his victim so much as some other sinners. If the victim be good, he is sent the sooner to God's peace, if he be evil, he is restrained from piling up more sins. Greater a thousand-fold are the crimes of vice which ruin the victim's oul and body. Ye who would judge Macbeth hardly, remember that many people can by nature put from them the

consideration of the means toward their end. The angler, in desire to catch his dinner, puts from him the thought of the pain he causes the fish and ignores the torture and death he causes the worm to catch the fish; the speculator ignores the suffering he causes to his victims; the politician abstracts his thought from the intervening stages of good or evil to others in the pursuit of his one great aim; the despot drives his people forth to war for his own glory, and forgets their wounds, their agonies, their death. Thus Lady Macbeth thought only of the crown of her Scotland for Macbeth (perhaps also somewhat of securing Macbeth as protector of Scotland). She looked upon Duncan as an obstacle, and removed him by the speediest means. She refused to think of the moral responsibility of the deed until too late, and then it gnawed her heart out.

call such a woman a fiend?

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fiend?"

What is the

Would any definition of a The tempter, ere the accuser of mankind." A being who has no will to repent and no place for repentance; no feeling but hate and scorn for his victims, one who revels in evil for its own sake. In the course of the drama, Shakespeare had shown us the beginnings of sin, its unsatisfactoriness, its productiveness of new evil, in its effects upon two noble minds warped thereby into courses not natural to them. But he did not paint them " fiendlike," the accusers as well as tempters of each other. He had showed how mutual love and trust remained. He had awakened our pity for the lady in her rooted sorrow and sleepless remorse, and restored somewhat of sympathy for Macbeth, when he had cast off the fiends that he had trusted, and his old brave spirit woke in him, when he had nothing to rely on but his own right arm in the final struggle. (The poet did not wish to increase our tragic pain into horror. Is it possible that the poet, after having so skilfully treated our excited feelings, should have so inartistically dragged us back into the horror of the mid-action, and shocked the sensibilities he had awakened? Having led up to this triumph of his art, he was too true a psychologist, too keen

a sympathiser with elemental human nature, to have called such beings" fiend-like." Could he complete his wonderful picture of Rembrandtesque power and pathos, of the LadyQueen suffering remorse by adding such words

"Of this dead butcher, and his fiend-like Queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life?"

I, for one, cannot conceive the master writing these words, and feel sure they must have been some interpolation, by one who could not understand his ways.

Critics have tried to compare Lady Macbeth to characters in Classic and in Modern Literature. None succeed. (The one that seems to me most nearly in touch with her is the 66 Miriam of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Transformation.'

A Discussion. Printed in the Ladies' Edinburgh Magazine, 1877.

T

VII.

JUSTICE SHALLOW

NOT INTENDED AS A SATIRE ON SIR THOMAS LUCY.

HE untrustworthy nature of much of the traditionary gossip that clouds the true life of Shakespeare may well be illustrated from the associations that have clustered round the character-sketch of "Robert Shallow, Esquire," the Gloucestershire Justice. Tradition gives a story concerning young Shakespeare, of deer stealing, punishment, imprisonment, a satirical ballad hung on Charlecote Park gates, a flight to London, and a stage revenge on the Stratford-on-Avon Justice. Ordinary methods of determining authenticity, when applied to these traditions, elucidate their genesis.

In regard to the deer-stealing story, it is quite possible that Shakespeare may have chased many a forbidden deer, as that was supposed to be an accomplishment necessary to every youth of spirit. Sir Philip Sidney in his May Lady,' describes deer-stealing as "a pretty service." The Oxford students had always been notorious poachers. Dr. Forman relates how two students in 1573 (one of them John Thornborough, afterwards Dean of York and Bishop of Worcester) never studied or gave themselves to their books, but to go to schools of defence, to the dancing schools, to steal deer and conies, and to hunt the hare."

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But it is quite impossible that Sir Thomas Lucy could have acted in the way he is supposed to have done. In the first place he had no Warwickshire deer park to steal deer from, as may be proved from his father's will, and from Leland's account of Charlecote in his Itinerary. He had a warren, it is true, but that could not count, as some writers suppose. Manwood, the chief contemporary authority on the Forest Laws, says: "The hare, the conie, the pheasant, the partridge, and none other are accompted beasts or foules of warren." Even Fulbrook Park, which the Traditionalists fall back upon as a possible scene of the exploit, was at his time disparked, and belonged to Sir Francis Englefield, a Recusant, abroad without leave from the Queen. It is true Sir Thomas Lucy had charge of it. The park of Sir Thomas, however, was of his wife's inheritance in Worcestershire. He never presented deer to the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, as other neighbouring park owners did.1 He may have brought over some for his own use to Charlecote Warren; but the Act of 5 Eliza. 11, only concerns deer taken from a "statutable enclosed park." If Shakespeare had had one of these, he would likely have managed it in such a way as to be able to defy the forest laws. There were so many loopholes of escape in them. The law allowed that men may kill such wild beasts in their wildness, when they are found wandering, being out of a forest, parke, or chase, 1 His grandson did present a buck to the Tower after he had his park.

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