— ἄνδρες χαλεπά who are mated with women cast in the same rough mould. You feel, too, you are carried to the cold and misty- the storm-swept The and monster-teeming North. very atmosphere you breathe seems murky as you read. The braying of trumpets

"Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death"

the rattling clang of mail, the fierce shout of the slaughterous battle-field, the groans of the dying, alternate in your ear with the stealthy tread of the murderer, the lamentations over innocent victims, the terrible outpourings of the remorse of him "that was once so good," the vocal dreams of his distraught wife as she re-enacts a scene to sear the eyeballs, the ravings of a guilty conscience, potent enough to conjure up a ghastly apparition in the hour of festivity, and in the midst of the throng of living warriors. The earth not alone rings with the sounds of conflict, shrieks of lamentation, and strange screams of death-the air is not alone harassed, and weighed down, and thickened, as it were, with the incantations of witches and the mutterings of demons-but all nature, physical as well as moral, is convulsed. Every thing goes against use. Prodigies abound and multiply

"The heavens, as troubled with man's act,

Threaten his bloody stage."

Throughout the whole play there are but what Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the language of his art, would call three bits of repose; and these serve not to raise pity or calm the mind, but, on the contrary, to increase the terror or horror, like the fearful silence which precedes some "terrible feat," and during which the boldest hold their breath.* The first of these is the short gentle dialogue, in front of Macbeth's castle, between Duncan and Banquo. It is as the into way bleating of the lamb on its the slaughter-house. Duncan is never to go forth. The presaging raven, though Duncan see him not, is, we

know, upon the battlements, as well

as

"the guest of summer;" and, democrat as he is, he has scented doomed carrion in the person of a king, and croaked forth his prophecy. The murdering ministers have answered the fell invocation of the lady. The cluster of fair and peaceful images and sensations brought upon us by this little dialogue-the huge castle, with its variety of fortifications and towers, now sank as quietly into its noontide repose as its own slumbering shadow-the soft, calm, bright day-the delicate air,

that

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses,"

-all, by their contrast with the designs then swelling in human bosoms within the walls, and by our conviction that fate must be fulfilled, and that Duncan is fated, deepen the horror of the scene gone by and the scenes that are to come. Shakspeare, who delighted in the use of contrast, has one other like this. It is when the ill-starred Romeo, at the crisis of his fate, is buoyed up by false hope, and deceived by a baleful dream, the ουλος ὄνειρος of the poet :

"Romeo. If I may trust the flattering of my sleep,

My dreams presage some joyful news at hand:

My bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne;

And all this day an unaccustomed spirit Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts."

Was feverous and did shake."

What a picture it is to see this brutal porter carousing with his fellows in his lodge "till the second cock," while the desperate wickedness of man was raging within the castle, and the elements were at strife, and all nature disorganised without! Here, indeed, by the contrast,

"On horror's head horrors accumulate!"

The third consists of the forced merriment, the forlorn jesting of Lady Macduff with her boy, after she has learned the flight of her husband, and just before the murderers burst in upon her and her little ones. This is terrible. Pity is altogether absorbed in horror. And you are in utter unrest from the certainty of what is to come. Macbeth has said it; and, until his own destiny be fulfilled, his words are fate :-

"The castle of Macduff I will surprise; Seize upon Fife; give to the edge of the sword

His wife, his babes, and all the unfortunate souls

That trace his line."

There is no repose in the dialogue between Malcolm, Rosse, and Macduff. The narration of Rosse and the grief of Macduff are horrific. It is terror for the life or reason of the man, and not the gentle emotion of pity for his loss-for those who were savagely slaughtered-which affects Malcolm:

"Merciful Heaven! What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak

Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break."

In all Shakspeare's tragedies there

are powerful contrasts; but it is in Macbeth only there are no sunny spots. Chateaubriand, who, in my mind, being a poet, a scholar, and a gentleman, like Shakspeare, was, in spite of not having the fortune of being born a Briton, one of Shakspeare's very best commentators, doth well observe:

Shakspeare plays at one and the same moment the tragedy in the palace and the comedy at the door. He does not paint a particular class of men; he mingles, as they are mingled in real life, the sovereign and the slave, the patrician and the plebeian, the warrior and the peasant, the illustrious and the obscure. He makes no distinction between classes; he does not separate the noble from the ignoble, the serious from the comic, the gay from the grave, laughter from tears, joy from grief, or good from evil. He sets in motion the whole of society, as he unfolds at full length the life of a man. great poet knew that the incidents of a single day cannot present a picture of human existence, and that there is unity from the cradle to the tomb. He takes a youthful head; and if he does not strike it off, he gives it you back whitened by age. Time has invested him with his own power."

The

All this, which has been so eloquently delivered, is true of Shakspeare's psychological plays, of his histories, and, in short, of all his serious plays. But, I repeat, there be most sweetly soft, and gentle, and sunny spots upon which the free heart can disport itself in all but Macbeth. You have every where else snatches of that tenderness of earth's humanity,

"Aloft ascending, and descending deep, Even to the inferior kinds,"

and of heavenly love condescending to God's creatures. But in Macbeth, from first to last, hell prevails. Its ministers are human and demoniac, and its victims constitute the characters. In Shakspeare's other plays, however profoundly tragic, his women shed an atmosphere of light around them. Dark as may be the woof, they glide through the warp in threads of purest gold. They gleam like sunbeams through a fitful sky. It is impossible, as we contemplate the images and fortunes of Desdemona, Imogene, Ophelia, Juliet, Cordelia, not to feel smitten with the utmost tenderness of pity. They are so sweet, so pure, So womanly. Not so Lady Macbeth

and Lady Macduff: their presence serves only to darken and deepen the terrors of the tragedy. They never display the graces and attractions of the gentler sex. Lady Macbeth is from the commencement numine quodam afflatus-and that is an evil spirit. She is under a frenzied excitement until the murder has been committed and the sceptre won. She afterwards sinks into a remorse which she harbours solely in her own bosom until her intellect becomes diseased, and her mortal frame gives way. And she never repents. Like Beaufort, she dies and makes no sign of penitence or hope of mercy. Her very love and devotedness to her husband, in which every other feeling with respect to here and hereafter is utterly absorbed, amounts to mania. The remorse of such a being, from its dreariness and intensity, produces horror in the human heart; but we may not pity. Again, Lady Macduff displays none of the exquisite gentleness which distinguishes "Shakspeare's women." That she should rail at the intelligence conveyed by Rosse is true to ordinary nature; but "sweetest Imogene would not have received it in this sort. Observe how she bears herself when her ear is smitten with intelligence of her husband infinitely more disastrous. The jesting of the frightened and heartsick Lady Macduff with her innocent child is terrible. It heightens the horror of the slaughter, to which it forms a prelude, which, in its violent contrast, no writer but Shakspeare could have imagined, or would have ventured to adopt. In a word, in Macbeth none of the gentler emotions of our nature are, as in every other tragedy of Shakspeare, excited by the conduct and bearing of the women. Another peculiarity in this drama is founded upon its wondrous methodical unity, and consists in this, the whole interest is concentred in the one character. Macbeth, whether present or absent from the scene, is never for an instant removed from our mental vision. The spirit of Macbeth is felt by the eye which cannot desery its "sightless substance." It is felt by every body and in every place-on the blasted heath, in the palace of the English king, in the forest of Forres, in the castle of Macduff, in the sick VOL. XXIV. NO. CXLII.

chamber of his wife. He is as omnipresent as Fate, whose vicegerent upon earth he seems. There is no character in the play to share 'any portion of the interest with Macbeth, as in the other psychological dramas. There is no Mercutio to assume the supremacy while he is on the stage, and turn our thoughts aside from terror and pity by his exquisite wit and sprightliness-no Ophelia to draw us away from the moral and metaphysical horrors of the "royal tragedy of maniacs" by the unmerited sorrows that crush her gentle heart-no Iago to tower in intellectual stature above the hero of the drama. There are no snatches of poetry on whose calm and quiet beauty the mind can repose no passages of tenderness which suffuse the eyes with that heavenly sorrow which purifies-no sweet descriptions (except the one) of external nature, such as those in which Shakspeare elsewhere, ay, even in Hamlet, revels. No! the majestic poetry of Macbeth throughout stirs you as "with the sound of a trumpet;" or comes over your senses like a strain of melancholy music, such as Milton describes to have gushed from the harps of the fallen angels in hell; or it makes your seated heart knock at your ribs with the train of horrible thoughts and images it conjures up. There is no exhibition of tenderness except betwixt the guilty miserable pair, and this but causes saddest admiration. The scenery accords with the stern actors and the story,- the blasted, witch-trodden heath-the interiors of wildly-sited feudal castles

-the dark forest-the cavern in which the witches celebrate their hellish rites-the field of bloody battle. Lady Macbeth has unsexed herself in the feeling of ambition, and the determination to comfort and countenance her lord in maintaining his place in this world, by no matter what guilt, so as to become in the spirit a part of him; and the same reasons that give us a thrilling interest in him extend in a degree to her. But for all the other characters, including even the high-hearted Banquo, we have no other interest than as they are beings belonging to Macbeth's story. The interest, too, we take in Macbeth, and, by reflection, in his weaker half, is altogether

EE

an interest of the mind. We are forced to admire their perfect union with and fidelity to each other. But our interest is founded on the exalted courage and force of intellect displayed. The heart is never touched. We cannot love the slaughterous sinner and his mate; and they are far, far above pity. The truth is, a higher principle is evolved, and we are conscious of it from the first, than is to be found in any other modern tragedy. The moral, as I have shewn, is the utter vanity and vexation of ambition, even in the person of the perfect man. There is none other in the tragedy. The most innocent, the best and the noblest, perish the wife and children of Macduffthe gracious Duncan-the wise and valiant Banquo, on whom Nature had set her own seal of royalty. The ignoble lot survive to triumph. Macbeth is strictly a fatidical story. It is cast in the antique Greek model; and had Macbeth been a hero of the Greeks and the superstitions of the two countries similar, it might have been played in the Greek tongue upon the Athenian stage, and with the like awful power as

the Eumenides of Eschylus. One thing only need have been retrenched. One thing would have been added. Banquo would not not have been murdered on the stage coram populo. Duncan and his chamberlains would have been exhibited as a tableau of savagely slaughtered men by means of the eccyclema. Macbeth in this essential point is a Greek drama, as the Greek drama has been well described, not a drama of human motives, but of divine dispensations :

Πολλαι μορφαί των δαιμονίων
Πολλα δ' αιλπτως κραινουσι θεοί.
Και τα δοκηθεντ ̓ οὐχ ετελέσθη,
Των δ' αδοκήτων πορον εύρε θεος.
Τοιονδ' απεθη τοδε πραγμα.

Macbeth is cast esoterically altogether in the Greek mould; and excels every Greek tragedy by the measure whereby Macbeth raises himself upon the rocky foundation

of

THOUGHT I to myself, sulkily rolling out of bed at that horrible hour of six,

(Description of morning here.) were I a man of 10,000l. a-year, I would let the country shift for itself rather than lose three snug hours of rest, the best and sweetest out of the nine that every man ought to have; but it was evident that Mr Britton had a vast mind to serve his country, -for there he was fresh up, and dressed, and smiling; though I have very good reason to fancy he had been composing a little impromptu speech since the hour when we met last. And yet we had only separated at two in the morning-four brief hours before. O patria! 0 mores! are these the habits that an independent gentleman is called upon to indulge in?

At half-past six, the black cob of Mr. Britton's seconder and aide-decamp might be seen cantering over the rising ground of the Park before the windows; and presently that gentleman made his appearance in a green coat and white duck pantaloons (my own costume to a tittle), with the Britton colours flaunting over a manly bosom that required, said Mr. Seconder, some inward refreshment.

Down sat the two gentlemen to their breakfast. Ah! it does one good-one who has been in populous cities pent-to see how two hale north-country squires can take a breakfast. We do not breakfast in that fashion in Broadway, miss. I was heavy, dull, numbed, scarce awake, longing for soda-water, and the deuce knows what, as these two Britoners were cheerfully chumping muffins, eggs, grilled fowls, and grilled ham, and quaffing great healthy bowls of coffee and tea preparatory to the morning's ride.

As we ascended my carriage (passez moi le mot, and allow me to call it mine), the morning, which had been pretty clear, set in with its usual

softness, and the rain fell pretty smartly.

It was curious, and affecting almost, to see the perfect calmness and simplicity with which the postilions, in their little green jackets and tight leathers, bobbed regularly up and down, as the celestial waters descended. By Jupiter Pluvius, these fellows do not seem to care for water any more than their masters do for sleep.

The galloping greys carried us through half-a-dozen miles of Guttlebury Park, which, as every body knows, is twenty miles long.

As we passed through the village, the flags were flapping over the beer-houses, the people were out, the old women especially clapping wildly their hands, and yelling "Britton for ever!" The young persons were, as I thought, chiefly for the pink candidate; and why? because the sagacious Mr. Bouncer, in passing through the various villages in his canvass, had taken care to provide every woman who would accept it with a pink handkerchief, ribands, -ay, or gown. I augured ill of his cause from that circumstance. My friend, Mr. Britton, was above such briberies; and, indeed, I must say so much for that gentleman's character, that even to gain his election, I don't think he would have resorted to any such arts as his opponents were not scrupulous about adopting.

I have kept the reader's eye off him purposely for a few minutes,for the fact is, he and Mr. Hartington, his seconder, are both lying back in their seats, conning over in their minds the impromptus they are just going to make at Stuffington. I look as if I was not in the least aware of this manœuvre of theirs; but feel astonishingly interested in a book.

Look, however, we are close upon Stuffington; there is the tower of that wonderfully old-new church, as I live; and, tootoorootooroo,-hark! what a braying the trumpets are