not yet in utter blackness of night. When the play opens, the sun is already dropping below the verge. And as at sunset strange winds arise, and gather clouds to westward with mysterious pause and stir, so the play of Macbeth opens with movement of mysterious, spiritual powers, which are auxiliary of that awful shadow which first creeps and then strides across the moral horizon." - DOWDEN, Shakspere: His Mind and Art. "Covetousness easily converted into violence, violence easily converted into crime, crime easily converted into madness, — this progression is Macbeth. Covetousness, Crime, Madness, these three witches have spoken to him in solitude, and have invited him to the throne. The cat Graymalkin has called him, Macbeth will be cunning; the toad Paddock has called him, Macbeth will be horror; the unsexed being, Gruoch (his wife), completes him. It is finished; Macbeth is no longer a man. is for the future only an unconscious energy rushing furiously towards evil. No conception of right henceforth; appetite is all. Transitory right, royalty; eternal right, hospitality; Macbeth kills one as well as the other. does more than kill them he ignores them. Before falling bleeding under his hand, they were lying dead in his soul. He He "Macbeth commences by this parricide, killing Duncan, killing his guest, - a crime so terrible that from the' recoil, the very night when their master is slain, the horses of Duncan become wild again. The first step taken, the fatal descent begins. It is the avalanche. Macbeth trips up. He is precipitated. He falls and rebounds from one crime to another, always lower. He undergoes the dismal gravitation of matter invading the soul. He is a thing which destroys. He is a stone of ruin, a flame of war, a beast of prey, a scourge. He sends through all Scotland, like a king that he is, his kerns with bare knees and his gallowglasses heavily armed, slaying, pillaging, slaughtering. He decimates the thanes; he murders Banquo; he murders all the Macduffs, except that one who will kill him; he murders the people; he murders his country; he murders 'sleep.' "At length the catastrophe arrives: Birnam Wood begins to march. Macbeth has assailed everything, overstepped everything, violated everything, shattered everything, and this fury ends by reaching Nature herself. Nature loses patience; Nature enters into action against Macbeth; Nature becomes soul against the man who has become force." - VICTOR HUGO. THE WEIRD SISTERS "It need hardly be once more repeated that the Witches of Macbeth are not the broomstick witches of vulgar, popular tradition. If they are grotesque, they are also sublime. The weird sisters of our dramatist may take their place beside the terrible old women of Michael Angelo, who spin the destinies of man. Shakspere is no more afraid than Michael Angelo of being vulgar. . . The great ideal artists are perfectly fear ... less in their use of the material, the definite, the gross, the so-called vulgar. "And thus Shakspere fearlessly showed us his weird sisters, the goddesses of destinie' brewing infernal charms in their wicked caldron. . . . Yet these weird sisters remain terrible and sublime. They tingle in every fibre with evil energy, as the tempest does with electric current; their malignity is inexhaustible; they are wells of sin springing up into everlasting death; they have their raptures and ecstasies in crime; they snatch with delight at the relics of impiety and foul disease; they are the awful inspirers of murder, insanity, suicide. 6 "The weird sisters, says Gervinus, are simply the embodiment of inward temptation.' They are surely much more than this. The attempt to divorce ourselves from the large impersonal life of the world, and to erect ourselves into independent wills, is the dream of the idealist. And between the evil within and the evil without subsists a terrible sympathy and reciprocity. There is in the atmosphere a zymotic poison of sin; and the constitution which is morally enfeebled supplies appropriate nutriment for the germs of disease; while the hardy moral nature repels the same germs. Macbeth is infected; Banquo passes free. “Let us, then, not inquire after the names of these fatal sisters. Nameless they are, and sexless. It is enough to know that such powers auxiliary to vice do exist outside ourselves, and that Shakspere was scien tifically accurate in his statement of the fact." — DowDEN, Shakspere: His Mind and Art. MACBETH "The leading features in the character of Macbeth are striking enough, and they form what may be thought at first only a bold, rude, Gothic outline. By comparing it with other characters of the same author we shall perceive the absolute truth and identity which is observed in the midst of the giddy whirl and rapid career of events. "Macbeth in Shakespeare no more loses his identity of character in the fluctuations of fortune or the storm of passion, than Macbeth in himself would have lost the identity of his person. Thus he is as distinct a being from Richard III. as it is possible to imagine, though these two characters in common hands, and indeed in the hands of any other poet, would have been a repetition of the same general idea, more or less exaggerated. "For both are tyrants, usurpers, murderers, both aspiring and ambitious, both courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circumstances. Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind, and naturally incapable of good. Macbeth is full of 'the milk of human kindness,' is frank, sociable, generous. He is tempted to the commission of guilt by golden opportunities, by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his loyalty. Richard on the contrary needs no prompter, but wades through a series of crimes to the height of ambition from the ungovernable violence of his temper and a reckless love of mischief. He is never gay but in the prospect or in the success of his villanies: Macbeth is full of horror at the thoughts of the murder of Duncan, which he is with difficulty prevailed on to commit, and of remorse after its perpetration. . "Macbeth endeavors to escape from reflection on his crimes by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief."— HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. "Macbeth is one of those characters marked out in all superstitions to become the prey and instrument of the perverse spirit who takes pleasure in destroying them because they have received some spark of the divine nature, and who, at the same time, meets with but few difficulties in his task, for the heavenly light darts but a few fleeting rays into their souls, which are obscured by storms at every instant." - GUIZOT, Shakspeare and His Times. LADY MACBETH "In the mind of Lady Macbeth, ambition is represented as the ruling motive, an intense overmastering passion, which is gratified at the expense of every just and generous principle, and every feminine feeling. "Yet she is not a mere monster of depravity, with whom we have nothing in common, nor a meteor whose |