realization of that prophecy that on the night of the murder rang through the sleeping house :

"Sleep no more.

Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more."

How this prophecy was fulfilled Macbeth himself tells us :

"Better be with the dead

Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;

After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well;

Treason has done his worst: nor steel nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,

Can touch him further."

Ambition, for which they strove, has cheated them at last; and the poor victim of their wrath is a subject of envy to them.

At the banquet Macbeth's imagination once more torments him. As he is about to take his seat among the guests, he perceives his place occupied by the murdered Banquo. Lady Macbeth leaving her throne remonstrates with him, and he again joins the guests, when, at the name of Banquo, he once more beholds the terrible apparition which causes him to show such horror that Lady Macbeth is compelled to dismiss the lords and others, who were invited to the banquet. When they are alone, the attentive reader cannot fail to remark how different is the conduct of Lady Macbeth towards him. Here she pours forth no reproaches, here is no chiding, even though he cries, in the agony of his heart,

"It will have blood; they say blood will have blood."

All the remonstrance of the queen is

"You lack the season of all natures-sleep."

This fresh disturbance of mind causes him to resort to the witches, who still delude him with prophecies that he will never be conquered but by what he considers impossibilities.

Meanwhile all things are working to the perfection of the retribution. Lady Macbeth is sick, less in body than in mind, and a doctor is summoned to attend her. But no skill or medicine is available to

"Minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff
That weighs upon the heart."

On her has fallen the curse which only her husband heard. "Sleep no more," is fulfilled in her case most awfully. Night by night she acts over in sleep the events of that awful hour which she only thought of then as the beginning of happiness. She who thought "a little water cleared them from the deed," now cries out as she rubs her hand, "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Imagination, dead till this hour, starts up to torture her, and in the end destroys her life.

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Macbeth, surrounded by his enemies, deserted by his friends, "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," the signs of his end, which he deemed could never be realised, coming to pass, 'gins "to be a-weary of the sun." And yet there is the spirit of the warrior still. With all things against him, we as yet find no fear in his mind. Superstition, that has led him through life, does not desert him at the time of his end. At this time, to add to all other ills, he hears the tidings of the queen's death. "She should have died hereafter," is all the allusion he makes to her. From this moment Horror's head horrors accumulate." A messenger reports that the wood of Birnam begins to move. Yet does the infatuated monarch cling to the last hope. But when Macduff informs him of the failure of his last safeguard, the spirit of the believer in witchcraft sinks within him, and his despair can only find words for a curse on his deceivers. Here ends Macbeth's retribution, for his death is that which becomes a warrior, and his last speech breathes out the spirit which distinguished him on that field where he won "the earnest of success," which led him, step by step, to the destruction of this hour.

"I will not yield

To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet will I try the last. Before my body

I throw my warlike shield.-Lay on, Macduff;
And damned be he who first cries, Hold, enough!"

Thus, then, have we traced out the two great agents in this extraordinary play, and although some time and space have been expended upon it, there is yet more which an attentive reader may discover, and it is a point well worth the pains.

A question has been raised, whether Macbeth sees two distinct ghosts, that of Banquo and that of Duncan in the banquet scene, or whether he sees the ghost of Banquo in both cases? The

question certainly is ingenious, and there is much to be said on both sides, for the matter merely rests upon conjecture. That the first is the ghost of Banquo is certain. Not only does it appear when Macbeth expresses a wish that Banquo were present, but also the expression "twenty mortal murders on their crowns," corresponds with the "twenty trenched gashes on his head, the least a death to nature."

Moreover, had this been the ghost of Duncan, Macbeth could not have said, "Thou canst not say, I did it," which he does say evidently to Banquo.

Now, as for the second. There certainly are strong points in favour of this being the ghost of Duncan. The manner of Macbeth towards it is totally different, exhibiting far greater horror than in the first instance. The description, too, seems to be that of an old man :

Besides all this, I think it highly probable that the banquet reminded him of that night when he entertained the unwary king in this same hall; and surely, if the ghost of Banquo, whom he did not murder personally, appears to him, how much rather that of Duncan, whom he slew with his own hand. Add to this, there is nothing which tells us that Lady Macbeth did not see this last ghost. The probability is that she did. In the first instance she chides Macbeth for his folly; in the second she dismisses the guests abruptly, I think as much to hide her feelings as those of the king; for we must observe, that she never from this hour derides his superstition, and from this she sickens. Had the second ghost been Banquo, it had never moved her. She had no hand in Banquo's death, and therefore Banquo's ghost could cause her no alarm. My own opinion is, that we have here two ghosts, which opinion receives more licence, as I believe the stage direction in the old copies is in both cases simply, "Ghost rises." On this point I have for some time dwelt, and confess that I am rather inclined to favour the opinion of the modern critic.

One word more before I leave the general points of this playone word upon the introduction of the singing witches. Every Shaksperian must be disgusted with the dancing and singing in this play. That Macbeth should be made an opera may please the pocket of the manager, and pamper the vitiated taste of the public,

but it cannot fail to disgust the real lover of our poet. For this purpose we have Middleton's witches dragged into Scotland, and doggrel rhymes into Shakspere's plays; while, amidst the tragic scenes of our great author, we are indulged with a dance from beings whom Shakspere has drawn awful and mysterious. Enough upon this point. Good taste will suggest more than I

can say.

Here, then, I leave the general points in Macbeth, proceeding in my next to the passages in this play.

C. H. H.

THE SONG OF NIGHT.

WHO am I, with my ebon vest?
Spangled with stars, over earth I creep,
And I scatter the dews of gentle sleep
On every weary eye;

And I give to the spirit rest,

As over the earth I peep

From my home in the cloudless sky.

Who am I, with my sable wings?
Shading the face of Cynthia fair
Filling the world with a silence rare,
Or song of the nightingale.
I am loved by all living things
In earth, and in sea, and air,

In the mountain, and wood, and vale.

Who am I, but the Spirit of Night?

I am the child of the golden sun;

And when first through the heaven his race was run,

I rose from the purple west,

Bringing sweet slumber and light,

And a heaven of peace and rest.

C. H. H.

Lisette; or, Fairy Favours.

PUCK. If we shadows have offended
Think but this, (and all is mended,)

That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.

Midsummer Night's Dream.

CHAPTER I.

HOW LISETTE LIVED IN THE VALLEY OF FLORAINE.

WERE the Guide-books wrong, when they said that in all the country round there was not a spot so pretty as Floraine? or of all the travellers that journeyed thither to verify its fame, was every one bewitched? One of these two things must have been the case; for no one, that ever returned, was able to say one word in praise of the village or its valley. The Guide-books certainly were right;they gave even a classified catalogue of the beauties of the neighbourhood; but then the chief beauty was omitted, there was no mention of Lisette; and nobody went to Floraine without seeing Lisette; and with Lisette to look at, who could have time to waste over the valley? And so the travellers came back, and could not tell whether Floraine was a desert or a garden; though they were quite sure it must be a paradise, or else it could not hold a Lisette. -They called her Lisette, but the very old men of the village positively declared that her proper baptismal name had been Elizabeth. Not that it at all required an old man to remember when Lisette had been baptized; only no one but a very old man would have thought of remembering anything, that could change the merry and kind Lisette into a prim and stately Elizabeth.—Well but, Floraine—this paradise. Yes, the travellers thought right,—a paradise it was; the very philosophers called it a kingdom of flowers, although they knew no more of flowers than that one might be gamosepalous, another polypetalous; but a kingdom of flowers it must be, for its name was derived from latin words to that effect, and had it been another Zahara, the classical