to have realized so speedily all the greatness that the Weird Sisters had promised him, by virtue, as he supposes, of preternatural knowledge, unless he can prevent the accomplishment of the prediction which, by virtue of the very same knowledge, they have made in favour of the race of Banquo after Macbeth's own time. His desire to prevent even this remote participation of Banquo's issue in the greatness for which he thinks himself partly indebted to this " metaphysical aid," is so infatuatedly headstrong as to make him absolutely, as he says, enter the lists against fate."

Now, admitting the intense selfishness which the above reflections disclose, and granting—what of course it would be absurd to deny that the act of murdering Duncan's attendants was most infamous, how does either of these admissions, in the slightest degree, affect the question which we have been considering? The reviewer says

"Let any one who may have been disposed, with most of the critics, to believe that Shakspeare has delineated Macbeth as a character originally remorseful, well consider that speech of

most elaborate, refined, and cold-blooded hypocrisy in which, so speedily after his poetical whinings over his own atrocity in murdering Duncan, he alleges his motives for killing the two sleeping attendants."

But if, as we have already seen, in the earlier passages of the drama, we have not the representation of an utterly remorseless character, no subsequent act can alter the fact, if so it be, that Macbeth was originally remorseful. Because, after his perpetration of a crime to which he has been impelled as much by the instigation of others as by the evil impulses in his own breast, Macbeth commits another dastardly and inhuman act, it cannot follow that, before he had become guilty of any crime, sensible of the claims of kindred and of the ties of gratitude and hospitality, he may not have experienced natural feelings of compunction while vehemently struggling with the temptations by which he was assailed. Duncan's assassination is the one great crime to the commission of which, as we have seen, Macbeth feels a strong moral repugnance, while painting to himself the enormity of the guilt he

would incur in the perpetration of so cowardly and treacherous an action. When, after a stormy contest with his conscientious scruples, hardened, for a while, to the dictates of every kindlier impulse within him, he has murdered his sovereign, his position is no longer that of a man struggling with temptation; it is the position of one who, however vainly, strives to stifle every remorseful feeling in his nature, and who, having, at length, become the incarnation of his own terrible imaginations, from the realization of which he had so long shrunk back with horror, is resolved, at all hazards, fully to accomplish that for the sake of which he has assassinated Duncan.

We were just now endeavouring to show that Macbeth's soliloquy "If it were done, &c.," is the expression of his conscientious objections to the murder of his sovereign, and that it is because they are so strongly felt by Macbeth that he subsequently urges those objections to his wife with all the eloquence he is master of. Although, when shamed out of the further expression of his moral scruples by the contemptuous bearing of his lady, no longer daring to whisper

of compunction, for the first time he alludes to the possibility of failure, we maintained that mere selfish apprehension was not the real cause of his reluctance to carry into execution his murderous design; for we argued that, if the possibility of failure had at that time been uppermost in his thoughts, the mere expedient of marking with blood the sleepy two of Duncan's chamber, and using their very daggers, could not possibly have been sufficient to have quieted his fears. Now we see Macbeth's own conviction of the insufficiency of that expedient in the conduct which he afterwards pursues. The means, however, subsequently adopted with the view of avoiding the possibility of discovery are not thought of until after the murder has been perpetrated, which would hardly have been the case if his repugnance to Duncan's assassination had been owing solely to his apprehensions of failure. That those means were absolutely necessary for securing the object which Macbeth and his wife wished for, it is not necessary, as, indeed, it would be impossible to show. That the chances of detection, however, were greatly lessened by the murder of

the attendants, cannot be denied. The whole circumstances of the assassination could not, of course, have been enveloped in so complete a mystery as they were, if the attendants had been in a condition with their own lips to have maintained their innocence.

The commission, then, of this last enormity is the corollary, so to speak, of the cold-blooded murder which had preceded it; and we can hardly wonder, when, for the attainment of an ambitious object, Macbeth has committed a signally base and treacherous action, at his subsequent commission of a crime which the commencement of an iniquitous course, as it appeared to him, had rendered necessary, not merely for his own security, but for the sake of that very object for which the murder of his sovereign had been determined on.

Somewhat similar are the considerations suggested by Banquo's assassination, as well as by the additional atrocities committed by Macbeth.

Because, after the murder of his sovereign, owing to the very different position in which