row preys upon his memory; his heart is oppressed by an accumulation of iniquity; and morally certain of conquest, he declines to combat with Macduff, for his "soul is too much charg'd with blood of his already."

The happiness of Macbeth and his wife is sacrificed in the pursuit of the object of their ambition; but a broad distinction must be drawn between their feelings. Lady Macbeth is the victim of a horror which it is difficult to define, for she exhibits not one symptom of remorse, and appears alarmed only by the recollection of deeds which made no impression on her at the time of their perpetration. The affliction of Macbeth, on the contrary, is that of conscience; the deep regrets of a virtuous mind for its aberrations from rectitude: reflection on his own deeds fills him with horror; of all other species of dread he is perfectly devoid; "he dares do all that may become a man;" and the mind he by "and the heart he bears, could never sagġ with doubt, nor shake with fear."+

sways

It has been already hinted, that the substitution of the gentle disposition of Donwald for the cruel nature of Macbeth, was made with the view of tracing the progress of the human mind from

its first aberrations from virtue to the last stage of depravity and wickedness; and if we superadd the intention of displaying the destructive influence of superstition on the peace and innocence of the mind in which it is suffered to take root, we shall only ascribe to Shakspeare a design which the tenderest humanity, and most enlightened policy, might have dictated. Not only at the period in which Macbeth was produced was the popular mind imbued with an implicit belief of the power of magicians, astrologers, and witches, to disclose the events of futurity, and of spirits to direct and control the actions of mankind; but the floating superstitions of the times were embodied and authenticated by an act of the first parliament of James against withcraft, and by the reprint, in England, of His Majesty's Essay on Dæmonology, shortly after his accession to the throne: error was, as it were, promulgated, and ignorance fortified in folly, by the sanction of authority and law.

The belief was implicit of the power of the witch to create tempests, hail, thunder, and lightning; to sink ships, turn the course of rivers, dry up springs, arrest the course of the sun, to stay both day and night, and change the one into the other. The harvest was either destroyed at their bidding, or transferred from one place to

another; animals were infected with the spirit of devils, cattle destroyed by their looks, and snakes torn in pieces by their words. The mind of man was perverted, and his corporeal powers blasted; he loved or hated, was valiant or a coward, he became potent or impotent, he pined in lingering decay, or was torn by fits and convulsions, as he was worked on by their spells. The witches could strike with barrenness, induce miscarriage, or destroy the infant in the womb. Children unbaptized, or not protected by the sign of the cross, were plucked from their mother's bosoms in the night, drowned in rivers, or killed by the thrust of a needle through the brain the infant's blood was sometimes drank, and its flesh devoured by its destroyer. Witches could strike with lightning, kill by the infection of their eyes, or destroy by the slow effect of charms or poison. They summoned souls from the repose of the grave; the secrets of the past were revealed, the future was familiar to them as the present, and they could foreshew to others the events which they themselves foresaw. They possessed the power of transforming themselves into the shape of animals, and, under the favourite metamorphosis of a wolf, preyed on the flesh of human beings, and particularly infants. Invisible, they passed through the smallest aper

ture, triumphant in the air they rode upon. the blast, and in an egg, a cockle, or a muscle shell, sailed through tempestuous seas.

The opinions entertained from time to time by different nations, and by the same nation at different periods, of the nature of the spiritual world, were numerous and contradictory; but towards the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries the idea was generally acquiesced in, that all the invisible inhabitants of the elements were originally Angels, holy, glorious, and powerful, but that they had been banished from heaven for disobedience; their glory was annihilated, their holiness perverted, and their power malignantly directed against the temporal and eternal happiness of the human race. Great discrimination was believed to have been used in the punishment of these fallen spirits. All were guilty, but not equally so, and their degradation was proportioned to their degrees of criminality. The least culpable were the spirits of fire, who wandered in the region of the moon, but without the power to enter it. The second sort, consisting of spirits of the air, had their habitation a little lower. The third were earthly, the fourth of water, the fifth subterranean, and the sixth delighted in darkness. Though the three first orders of spirits hate God, and are enemies to man, entering by sub

tilty into the minds of men to deceive them, and provoking them to absurd and wicked actions, their guilt bears no comparison to that of the Aquei, Subterranei, and Lucifugi. Aquei are they that raise tempests, drown sailors, and do all other mischiefs on the water. Subterranei and Lucifugi enter into the bowels of men, and torment those they possess with phrensy, and the falling evil; they also assault miners, and others who work in caverns and places under ground.

As much confusion was created in the theology of the ancients by the multiplication of deities whom it was acknowledged were all ultimately resolvable into one, so the spiritual system of the middle ages was rendered difficult of comprehension by the enumeration of a great variety of spirits, who were sometimes spoken of as existing independently, and, at others, simply as portions of the great diabolical power. Glanvil says, the devil is a name for a "body politic," in which there are very different orders and degrees of spirits; and Defoe humorously observes, “It is a question not yet determined by the learned whether the word devil' be a singular, that is, the name of a person standing by himself, or a noun of multitude."

Such were the beings with which ignorance