Shakespeare's art, affirming it to be the organic involution of the universal in the particular; that his characters are classes individualized; that his men and women are those of his own age and nation indeed, yet not in such sort but that they are equally the men and women of all ages and nations; for which cause they can never become obsolete, or cease to be natural and true Herein the Weird Sisters are thoroughly Shakespearian, there being nothing in his whole circle of character, wherein this method of art is more profoundly exemplified. Probably no form of superstition ever prevailed to any great extent, but that it had a ground and principle of truth. The old system of witchcraft was no doubt au embodiment of some natural law, a local and temporary outgrowth from something as general and permanent as human nature itself. Our moral being must breathe, and because it must have breath, therefore, in defect of other provision, it puts forth some such arrangement of breathing organs, as a tree puts forth leaves. The point of art, then, in this case was to raise and transfigure the literal into the symbolical; to take the body, so brittle and perishable in itself, and endow it with immortality; which of course could be done only by filling and animating it with the efficacy of imperishable truth. Accordingly the Poet took enough of current and traditionary matter to enlist old eredulity in behalf of agents suited to his peculiar purpose; representing to the age its own thoughts, and at the same time informng the representation with a deep moral significance suited to all ages alike. In The Witch we have but the literal form of a transient superstition in Macbeth that form is made the transparent vehicle of a truth coeval and coextensive with the workings of human guilt. In their literal character the Weird Sisters answer to something that was, and is not; in their symbolical character they answer to something that was, and is, and will abide; for they represent the mysterious action and reaction between the evil mind and external nature.

For the external world serves in some sort as a looking-glass, wherein man beholds the image of his fallen nature; and he still regards that image as his friend or his foe, and so parleys with it or turus from it, according as his will is more disposed to evil or to good. For the evil suggestions, which seem to us written in the face or speaking from the mouth of external objects and oecasions, are in reality but projections from our own evil bearts these are instances wherein we do receive but what we give: " the things we look upon seem inviting us to crime, whereas in truth our wishes construe their innocent meanings into wicked invitations. In the spirit and virtue of which principle the Weird Sisters symbolize the inward moral history of each and every man, and therefore may be expected to live in the faith of reasou so long as the present moral order or disorder of things shall last So that they may be aptly enough described as poetical or mythical impersonations of evil influences; as bodying forth in living

form the fearful echo which the natural world gives back to the evil that speaks out from the human heart. And the secret of their power over Macbeth lies mainly in that they present to him his embryo wishes and half-formed thoughts: at one time they harp his fear aright, at another time his hope; and that, too, even before such hope and fear have distinctly reported themselves in his consciousness; and by thus harping them, strengthen them into resolution and develope them into act. As men often know they would something, yet know not clearly what, until they hear it spoken by another; and sometimes even dream of being told things which their minds have been tugging at, but could not put into words.

All which may serve to suggest the real nature and scope of the effect which the Weird Sisters have on the action of the play; that their office is not so properly to deprave as to develope the characters whercon they act; not to create the evil heart, but to untie the evil hands. They put nothing into Macbeth's mind, but only draw out what was already there, breathing fructification upon his indwelling germs of sin, and thus acting as mediators, so to speak, between the secret upspringing purpose and the final accomplishment of crime. It is quite worthy of remark how Buchanan represents their appearance and prophecies to have been the coinage of his dreams; as if his mind were so swollen with ambitious thoughts, that they must needs haunt his pillow and people his sleep; and afterwards, when a part of the dream came to pass without his help, this put him upon working out for himself the fulfilment of the remainder. And in this view of the matter it is not easy to see but that a dream would every way satisfy the moral demands of the case, though it would by no means answer the purposes of the drama.

And the Poet evidently supposes from the first that Macbeth already had the will, and that what he wanted further was an earnest and assurance of success. And it is the ordering of things so as to meet this want, and the tracing of the mental processes and the subtle workings of evil consequent thereon, that renders this drama such a paragon of philosophy organized into art. The Weird Sisters rightly strike the key-note and lead off the terrible chorus, because they embody and realize to us, and even to the hero himself, that secret preparation of evil within him, out of which the whole action proceeds. In their fantastical and unearthly aspect, awakening mingled emotions of terror and mirth; in their mysterious reserve and oracular brevity of speech, so fitted at once to sharpen curiosity and awe down scepticism; in the circumstances of their prophetic greeting, a blasted heath, as a spot sacred to infernal orgies, - the influences of the place thus falling in with the preternatural style and matter of their disclosures;-in all this we may discern a peculiar aptness to generate even in strong minds a belief in their predictions. And such belief, for aught appears, takes hold on Banquo equally as on Macbeth; yet the only effect thereof in the former is to tes.

and approve his virtue. He sees and hears them with simple wonder; has no other interest in them than that of a natural and innocent curiosity; questions them merely with a view to learn what they are, not to draw out further promises; remains calm, collected, and perfectly planless, his thoughts being wholly taken up with what is before him; and because he sees nothing of himself in them, and has no germs of wickedness for them to work upon, therefore he "neither begs nor fears their favours nor their hate." Macbeth, on the other hand, kindles and starts at their words, his heart leaps forth to catch what they say, and he is cager and impatient to have them speak further; they seem to mean more than meets the ear, and he craves to hear that meaning expressed in full: all which is because they show him his own mind, and set astir the wicked desires his breast is teeming with: his mind all at once becomes strangely introversive, self-occupied, and absent from what is before him," that he seems rapt withal;" and afterwards, as soon as his ear is saluted with a partial fulfilment of their promise, he forthwith gets lost in thought, and shudders and goes into an ecstasy of terror at the horrid suggestions awakened within him, and his shuddering at them is even because of his yielding to them.

It is observable that Macbeth himself never thinks of making the Weird Sisters anywise responsible for his acts or intentions. The workings of his mind all along manifestly infer that he feels himself just as free to do right, and therefore just as guilty in doing wrong, as if no supernatural soliciting had come near him. He therefore never offers to soothe his conscience or satisfy his reason on the score of his being drawn or urged on by any fatal charm or fascination of hell; it being no less clear to him than to us, that whatsoever of such mighty magic there may be in the prophetic greeting is all owing to his own moral predisposition. For, In truth, the promise of the throne by the Weird Sisters, how firmly soever believed in, is no more an instigation to murder for it, than a promise of wealth in like sort would be to steal. To a truly just and virtuous man such a promise, in so far as he had faith therein, would preclude the motives to theft; his argument would be, that masmuch as he was fated to be rich he had nothing to do but wait for the riches to come. If, however, he were already a thief at heart, and kept from stealing only by fear of the consequences, he wou'd be apt to construe the promise of wealth into a promise of impunity in theft. Which appears to strike something near the difference between Banquo and Macbeth; for, in effect, with Banquo the prophetic words preclude, but with Macbeth themselves become, the motives to crime. So much for the origin of the murderous purpose, and the agency of the Weird Sisters in bringing it to a head.

Hencefe-h Macbeth's doubts and difficulties, his shrinkings and nrsgivings, spring from the peculiar structure and movement of bis intellect, as sympathetically inflamed and wrought upon by the

poison of meditated guilt. His whole state of man suffers an insurrection; conscience forthwith sets his understanding and imagination into morbid, irregular, convulsive action, insomuch that the former disappears in the tempestuous agitations of thought which itself stirs up: his will is buffeted and staggered with prudential reasonings and fantastical terrors, both of which are selfgenerated out of his disordered and unnatural state of mind Here begins his long and fatal course of self-delusion. He misderives his scruples, misplaces his apprehensions, mistranslates the whispers and writhings of conscience into the suggestions of prudence, the forecastings of reason, the threatenings of danger. His strong and excitable imagination, set on fire of conscience, fascinates and spell-binds the other faculties, and so gives an objective force and effect to its internal workings. Under this guilt-begotten hallucination, "present fears are less than horrible imaginings." Thus, instead of acting directly in the form of remorse, conscience comes to act circuitously through imaginary terrors, which again react on the conscience, as fire is kept burning by the current of air which itself generates. Hence his apparent freedom from compunctious visitings even when he is really most subject to them. It is probably from oversight of this that some have set him down as a timid, cautious, remorseless villain, withheld from crime only by a shrinking, selfish apprehensiveness. He does indeed seem strangely dead to the guilt and morbidly alive to the dangers of his enterprise; free from remorses of conscience, and filled with imaginary fears but whence his uncontrollable irritability of imagination? how comes it that his mind so swarms with horrible imaginings, but that his imagination itself is set on fire of hell? So that he seems remorseless, because in his mind the agonies of remorse project and translate themselves into the spectres of a conscience-stricken imagination.

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His conscience thus acting, as it were, in disguise and masquer. ade, the natural effect at first is, to make him wavering and irres olute the harrowings of guilty fear have a certain prospective and preventive operation, causing him to recoil, he scarce knows why, from the work he has in hand. So that he would never be able to go through, but for the coming in of a partner and helpmeet in the wicked purpose. But afterwards, the first crime hav ing passed from prospect into retrospect, the self-same working of conscience has the effect of goading and hurrying him on from crime to crime. He still mistakes his inward pangs for outward perils guilt peoples his whereabout with fantastical terrors, which in seeking to beat down he only multiplies. Amidst his efforts to dissimulate he loses his self-control, and spills the awful secret he is trying to hide; and in giving others cause to suspect him, he makes himself cause to suspect them. Thus his cowardice of conscience urges him on to fresh murders, and every murder but adds to that cowardice; the very blood which he spills to quiet

his fears sprouting up in "gorgons and chimeras dire to awaken

new fears and call for more victims.

The critics of a certain school have in characteristic fashion found fault with the huddling together and confusion of metaphors. which Macbeth pours forth when his mind is preternaturally heated and wrought up. Doubtless they would have him talk always according to the rules of grainmar and rhetoric. Shakespeare was content to let him talk according to his state of mind and the laws of his character. Nor, in this view, could any thing bet er servo the Poet's purpose, than this preternatural rush aud redundancy of imagination, hurrying on from thought to thought, and running and massing a multitude of half-formed images together. And such a cast of mind in the hero was necessary to the health of the drama: otherwise such a manifold tragedy had been in danger of turning out an accumulation of horrors. As it is, the impression is at once softened and deepened, after a style of art which Shakespeare alone could evoke and manage: the terrible is made to tread, sometimes to tremble, on the outmost edge, yet never passes into the horrible; what were else too frightful to be born being thus kept within the limits of pleasurable emotion. Macbeth's imagination so overwrought and self-accelerating, this it is that glorifies the drama with such an interfusion of tragic terror and lyrical sweetness, and pours over the whole that baptism of terrible beauty which forms its distinctive excellence.

In the structure and working of her mind and moral frame Lady Macbeth is the opposite of her husband, and for that reason all the better fitted to piece out and make up his deficiency. Of a firm, sharp, wiry, matter-of-fact intellect, doubly charged with energy of will she has little in common with him save a red-hot ambition; for which cause, while the prophetic disclosures have the same effect on her will as on his, and she forthwith jumps into the same purpose, the effect on her mind is just the reverse; she being subject to no such involuntary and uncontrollable tumults of thought without his irritability of understanding and imagination, she therefore has no such prudential misgivings or terrible illusions to make her shake, and falter, and recoil. So that what terrifies him, transports her; what stimulates his reflective powers, stifles hers.

Almost any other dramatist would have brought the Weird Sisters to act immediately upon Lady Macbeth, and through her upon her husband, as thinking her more open to superstitious allurements and charms. Shakespeare seems to have understood that aptness of mind for them to work upon would have unfitted her for working upon her husband in aid of them. Enough of such influence has already been brought to bear what is wanted further is quite another sort of influence; such a sort as could only be wielded by a mind not much accessible to the fc mer. There was strong dramatic reason, therefore, why nothing should