ever burns.

His frame ever writhes. His conscience, still most

disquiet, tosses to and fro.

"Sleep no more."

On the tortures of the mind he lies,

"In restless ecstacy :"

He envies the dead for their repose:

"Duncan is in his grave, He sleeps well."

The cruel wife, smitten with the same imprecation,―walking in her sleep, sighing over her guilt in broken words,—leaves all tragic character in the shade. We might suppose that the Clytemnestra of Eschylus and Sophocles would be the nearest parallel. The Chorus in the Choephoroi of the former gives a description of her terrors and her dreams. She has commanded lamps to be kept lighted always in her chamber. She thinks that a dragon is born of her, who sucks from her breasts clotted blood. So in the Electra of the latter, Chrysothemis narrates another dream which appals the adulterate murderess. But how more sublime is it that Scotland's demon-queen should act and unfold her appalling trance! Somnambulism is the very restlessness we might expect. She is a troubled spirit. Guilt of such an order, pent up in such a bosom, wrings out its confession. Her never-failing self-command, her caution, her dissimulation, cannot now avail. How she could preside at the feast! How she could fawn at her monarch's feet, and gracefully dispense her favours and her smiles among her lordly guests! How she could

"Keep her state!"

But now she enunciates a conscience too energised for restraint. So the wicked have often shrunk from sleep. They could not rule their visions as they might their waking thoughts.

"Perchance to dream."

Phantasies, but faithful to some dread truth, then held their sway. Interminable perspectives opened before them. Hands have come forth from shrouded forms, and been brandished

against them.

Accents, wailing and accusing, have pierced their ears. All has wavered with fear and swam in blood. Shapes were new with some unaltered likeness and some familiar voice. Fancy has shifted the combinations, but has left more hideous all the facts. Imagination has wrought all the fearful story into a tragedy, and bound the "guilty creature" to behold it slowly and climactericly performed. And what must have been her pictures, all independent of her, but which only she had drawn! Duncan's welling, gurgling, wounds! The frantic shrieks of Macduff's wife and all "his pretty ones!"

"Physician. Look how she rubs her hands."

“Gentlewoman.—It is an accustomed action with her to seem thus washing her hands; I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.". “Lady Macbeth.-Yet here's a spot."

This is not only most transcendent in itself, but is in strictest congruity with all the previous scenes. For it will be remembered that when she hails her lord, reeking from the murder, (who, in the distraction of his mind, has brought away with him the daggers he was to have laid near the servants of "the most sainted king," as proofs against them,) she exclaims,

"If he do bleed,

I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt."

Hark! to her guilty acknowledgment in this walking dream!

"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him !”

She had rejoined to her blood-stained Thane,

"A little water clears us of this deed:

How easy is it then!"

Hark! to the betrayal of her discomfited assurance!

"What will these hands ne'er be clean?

Here's the smell of the

blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand."

There is not the slightest ground to suppose that Shakspeare intended her insane. It is life realised to "the inward parts:" memory is but verified in all its impressions, and judgment but illuminated in all its convictions. It would be madness not

to think and feel as she actually does. There is no hallucination, no wayward thought. Most escape the past, to her it is inextricable. Its shadow is not only ever round about her, it is a present thing. Once she said,

"I feel the future in the instant;"

in the instant is now crowded, and lives, all the past. Malcolm could have no knowledge that she

66
"By self and violent hands took off her life."

The physician has ordered to be

"Removed from her the means of all annoyance."

She is inwardly consumed. No dew of sleep is on her eye-lid. No sweet oblivion soothes her spirit. She " sleeps no more." The one curse of the House is upon her:

"Thick-coming fancies keep her from her rest.”

The Sorcery of the play agrees to the superstitions of that distant age; it was scarcely exploded in the times of our bard. He very ingeniously connects it with the Classical Mythology, subordinating the witches to Hecate. The cave of Acheron is, as by her spell, brought near, or all by the enchantment are hurried thither. And there is consistency in this. For in the soliloquy of Macbeth, ere the bell is struck, he says:

"Now witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate's offerings."

No power is so changeful as this. It is celestial and infernal. It is Diana, that Panonym and Multiform. She bears spirits from Earth to Hades. She is the authority of all incantations. She presides over all magic rites.

"She is the mistress of these charms."

This not only raises such supernatural machinery, but the attendant circumstances correspond in elevation. There is the desert wild, over which the returning conquerors pass when they are accosted by these unearthly welcomers, we are transported to the awful den with its seething cauldron and its filthy ingre

dients, we gaze on the ministers and types of fate, our eyes strain after the shadowy procession of the kings, the last with his mirror, reflecting an indefinite lineage, succeeded by Banquo who smiles upon the childless usurper, and "points at them as his." The mind is carried to the highest pitch of a bewildering horror. And how did Shakspeare conceive, how has he described, these hateful prophetesses? Does he yield to a vulgar notion? Does he array them with pointed caps, and make them ride on broom-sticks? No, he clothes them with supernatural powers and adjuncts. They do not walk into and out of the scene. They are auxiliaries and clients of Hecate. They are spirits. They can

They are

"Charm the air to give a sound.”

"Horsed on sightless couriers."

They fly a trackless course. Their skiff sweeps in a moment an ocean's breadth. They lash the main into "yesty waves." They are terrific agents. They are

"Posters of the sea and land."

Their

They hold "the winds." They are aerial at pleasure. Their habits, strange and wild, are foreign to their essence. more human form is but their disfigurement and avatar.

Even

then they

"Look not like the inhabitants of the earth."

They "hover."

"Whither are they vanished?

Into the air and what seemed corporal, melted

As breath into the wind."

"They made themselves—air."

A question might be raised, and yet no satisfactory answer can be obtained to it, whether Scotland's "usurping king," and his "fiend-like wife," were parents of living children during the progress of the drama. She had known the bliss of the suckling. We hear not of its death. From his language,

"Bring forth men children only,"

--she may be presumed to be a bearing mother still.

"The natural ruby is on her cheeks!"

If what Macduff says, when Malcolm urges him to rouse from his grief for the slaughter of his children, apply to Macbeth,— the matter is settled. But I conceive that he then turns from the prince as one who cannot enter into his feelings,—and therefore can be no suitable comforter,-and remarks, as it were to Rosse,

"He has no children."

Neither parent was destitute of the instinctive fondness of offspring. She has already confessed her yearning. He feels a momentary relenting, and thinks of

"Pity, like a naked new-born babe."

The opinion which I rather favour, derives some colour from the tyrant's dread of Fleance. He cannot endure that Banquo's children should be kings. He glooms over his "barren sceptre" and "fruitless crown." He dwells He dwells upon the prediction,

"No son of mine succeeding."

Now, had he no heir, nor reasonable hope of one, this complaint would be absurd. He had not issue to ascend his throne, and yet grudges the "unlineal" successor. But the failure of the monarchy in his blood, the rise of another dynasty, is his constant theme of agonised suspense:

"Yet my heart

Throbs to know one thing."

Why should he care, if there be no child of his who can take the royal inheritance? Child or children there have been,—there may be yet. Death may have withered the young shoots of this accursed stock. If they survive, they are, it is imagined, very young. With their parents, all their expectations must perish. It seems probable, then, that in one of those minute pencillings which are so perfectly Shakspearean, the idea is suggested that such little ones have been timelessly and judicially cut off; or that, if living, too infant for any part in the action, they are