his speech in reply shows: "That will never be: who can impress the forest, [that is, press the forest into military service], bid the tree unfix his earth-bound root?" But now that he is assured that he "shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath to time and mortal custom," he is eager to know whether their predictions in regard to Banquo will be fulfilled: "Yet my heart throbs to know one thing tell me, : if your art can tell so much, shall Banquo's issue ever reign in this kingdom?" When he is told to "seek to know no more," his haughty and arbitrary imperiousness denounces them roundly, which they repay with "a show of eight Kings, the last with a glass in his hand: Banquo's Ghost following; - not the Banquo as he knew him in life, but the Banquo, blood-boltered, as he appeared to him in the banquet scene: "the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me, and points at them [the Kings] for his."

The witches are gleeful over their victim, whose eyeballs have been seared by what has been shown him. The first witch says: "Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprights, and show the best of our delights: I'll charm the air to give a sound, while you perform your antic round, that this great king may kindly say our duties did his welcome pay."

There's a hellish sarcasm intended in the word "kindly." And note especially the last sentence uttered by the witches, in the tragedy: "OUR DUTIES DID HIS WELCOME PAY."

It expresses implicitly all that has been set forth, in regard to the relation of the witches to Macbeth. He was the first to welcome them as guests to his bosom, and they have done their duty by him, as agents of the devil. They have originated nothing within him. They have but harped what he has previously desired and premeditated, and have thus stimulated his evil propensities into acts. In this last scene in which they appear, they urge him on in his career by flattering equivocations, and to these he will cling to the bitter end. Each in turn proves a false reliance; and, finally, he drops into the abyss which is yawning to receive him.

Verily the tragedy affords no support to the interpretation that

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the witches are the original instigators. If this interpretation were the true one, if Macbeth were a man whose natural temper," according to one of his interpreters, "would have deterred him " from the murder of his King, and if he were subjected at the outset, to an irresistible objective instigation (his free agency being destroyed by that instigation), to do such violence to his better nature, the tragedy would have no true dramatic merit, and should be consigned to the limbo of the so-called Heroic Plays of the Restoration Drama.

LADY MACBETH'S RELATIONS TO

MACBETH.

IN

N the foregoing chapter, it is shown that Macbeth welcomed the Witches as guests to his bosom, and that they did their duty by him as agents of evil. They originated nothing within him, they but harped what he had previously desired and meditated, and thus stimulated his evil propensities into acts. In the last scene in which they appear, the 1st of the 4th Act, they urge him on in his career by flattering equivocations, each of which proves a false reliance; but he clings to them, to the bitter end, and finally drops into the abyss which is yawning to receive him.

It can be as plainly read that the part played by Lady Macbeth was in the service of a wifely sympathy with her husband's o'ermastering desire for sovereignty and not of an independent ambition; a desire with which, so far as the evidence goes, in the play, she had nothing originally to do.

Macbeth first reveals himself, after his victory over his country's foes, before he returns to his own castle, there to be sustained and urged on to the killing of his King, by his devoted wife, whose powerful and untrammelled will is set against his trammelled will - trammelled, not by compunctious visitings, as is supposed by many commentators and readers, but by considerations of consequences; not of consequences to his own soul (for he goes so far as to say that he'd risk the life to come, if his ambition could be realized with outward safety to himself).

After his victory, when he and Banquo return to the palace, the amiable King expresses, in the strongest terms, his gratitude for the great services which his two generals, Macbeth and Banquo,

have rendered him. Macbeth replies in a speech informed apparently with the very soul of loyalty, but in which hypocrisy can no further go an hypocrisy involving, under the circumstances, the basest dishonor, and the blackest ingratitude: "The service and the loyalty I owe, in doing it, pays itself [that is, is its own reward] Your highness' part is to receive our duties; and our duties are to your throne and state, children and servants; which do but what they should, by doing everything safe toward your love and honor." The meaning of which is plain enough, if it be not considered too curiously. Duncan replies: "Welcome hither: I have begun to plant thee, and will labour to make thee full of growing. Noble Banquo that hast no less deserved, nor must be known no less to have done so, let me infold thee and hold thee to my heart."

How genuine and simple Banquo's reply! "There if I grow, the harvest is your own."

But now comes the immediate motive for Macbeth's evil desire to go forth into act. Duncan, in the fulness of his joys, nominates his eldest son, Malcolm, as his successor to the throne: "My plenteous joys, wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves in drops of sorrow. -Sons, kinsmen, thanes, and you whose places are the nearest, know we will establish our estate upon our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter the Prince of Cumberland; which honour must not unaccompanied invest him only, but signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine on all deservers. - From hence to Inverness, and bind us further to you." Macbeth replies in another hypocritical and traitorous speech: "The rest is labour, which is not used for you [that is, the rest which is not spent in the King's service, is like severe labor]. I'll be myself the harbinger and make joyful the hearing of my wife with your approach; so, humbly take my leave. Duncan. My worthy Cawdor!"

Before Macbeth goes out, he soliloquizes, the King and Banquo confer apart the subject of their conference being, as appears from Duncan's speech, Macbeth's valiant conduct. Macbeth says aside: "The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step on which

I must fall down, or else o'erleap, for in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires : the eye wink at the hand; yet let that be which the eye fears, when it is done, to see."

How prophetic the last sentence is ! the eye fears, when it is done, to see."

"Yet let that be, which

In the 2d Scene of the 2d Act, he says, after the murder: "I'll go no more: I am afraid to think what I have done; look on't again I dare not.”

This soliloquy is an all-sufficient evidence that Macbeth's regicidal intent was entirely independent of any suggestions from his wife, as it was entirely independent of any suggestions from the weird sisters. Lady Macbeth's ambition is wholly sympathetic. It is not with her an independent passion at all. When she knows her husband's all-absorbing desire, she sets about, in her wifely devotion, to help him to its realization, although she's fully aware that she must do fatal violence to her woman nature.

In the face of this 4th Scene of the 1st Act, and, it may be said, in the face of the whole play, Hazlitt pronounces Macbeth "full of the milk of human kindness" (an expression used by Lady Macbeth, but not therefore true; for she overestimates her husband at the outset she doesn't truly know him), “frank and generous. He is tempted to the commission of guilt by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his loyalty." This is an opinion substantially entertained by a large number of Shakespearian critics.

The temptation, on the contrary, was subjective. There's not a particle of evidence in the Play that the temptation originated from without, either with the witches or with Lady Macbeth. In their interview after his soliloquy, "If it were done when 'tis done," etc. (A. I. Sc. vii.), she says, in reply to his speech, "I dare do all that may become a man," "what beast was't then that made you break this enterprise to me?" That's sufficiently explicit, certainly.