To alter favour ever is to fear :
Leave all the rest to me.

[Exeunt.

But now it is that all his previous apprehensions of odium and of retribution rise up to his imagination against the deed, in more terribly vivid and concentrated which he feels within him no to oppose array; positive stimulant but that of pure ambition. This finally proves insufficient; and he falls back to the counter-resolve, "We will proceed no further in this business." But he finds, immovably planted behind him, sarcastic reproof from the woman whom he loves, if he loves any human being,-and, which makes it most formidable of all, from the woman who, he knows, devotedly loves him. Her exordium is fearful enough:—

Was the hope drunk,

Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since ?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely? From this time,

Such I account thy love.

Then comes the bitter imputation of moral cowardice:

Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valour,

As thou art in desire? &c.

And his effort to repel the charge

I dare do all that may become a man ;
Who dares do more, is none,-

only serves to bring upon him, most deservedly, the withering and resistless retort:

What beast was it, then,

That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both :
They have made themselves-and that their fitness now
Does unmake you.

This unanswerable sarcasm upon his (a man's and a soldier's) irresolution, is driven home with tenfold

force by the terrible illustration which she adds of her own (a woman's) inflexibility of will-"I have given suck," &c. No longer daring to plead his fear of public opinion, Macbeth now falls back upon his last remaining ground of objection, the possibility that their attempt may not succeed

If we should fail?

Her quiet reply, "We fail," is every way most characteristic of the speaker,-expressing that moral firmness in herself which makes her quite prepared to endure the consequences of failure,—and, at the same time, conveying the most decisive rebuke of such moral cowardice in her husband as can make him recede from a purpose merely on account of the possibility of defeat-a possibility which, up to the very completion of their design, seems never absent from her own mind, though she finds it necessary to banish it from that of her husband:

But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.

Up to this moment, let us observe, the precise mode of Duncan's assassination seems not be determined on, but is now first suggested to the vacillating mind of Macbeth by his self-possessed lady:

When Duncan is asleep

(Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey
Soundly invite him), his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassel so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie, as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
The unguarded Duncan ?-what not put upon
His spongy officers? who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell.

Macbeth receives this as a sort of blessed revelation, shewing him the way out of his horrible perplexity. In admiration at his wife's ready ingenuity, as con

M

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 "com

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,