have judged Lady Macbeth very differently. Take these frightful passages with the context-take the whole situation, and you will see that it is no such thing. A friend of mine truly observed, that if Macbeth had been a ruffian without any qualms of conscience, Lady Macbeth would have been the one to shrink and tremble: but that which quenched him lent her fire. The absolute necessity for self-command, the strength of her reason, and her love for her husband, combine at this critical moment to conquer all fear but the fear of detection, leaving her the full possession of her faculties. Recollect that the same woman who speaks with such horrible indifference of a little water clearing the blood-stain from her hand, sees in imagination that hand for ever reeking, for ever polluted; and when reason is no longer awake and paramount over the violated feelings of nature and womanhood, we behold her making unconscious efforts to wash out that "damned spot," and sighing, heart-broken, over that "little hand" which all the perfumes of Arabia will never sweeten more.

MEDON,

I hope you have given her a place among the women in whom the tender affections and moral sentiments predominate.

ALDA.

You laugh; but, jesting apart, perhaps it would have been a more accurate classification than placing her among the historical characters.

MEDON.

Apropos to the historical characters, I hope you have refused that insolent assumption, (shall I call it so ?) that Shakspeare tampered inexcusably with the truth of

history. He is the truest of all historians. His anachronisms always remind me of those in the fine old Italian pictures; either they are insignificant, or, if properly considered, are really beauties: for instance, every one knows that Correggio's St. Jerome presenting his books to the Virgin involves half a dozen anachronisms, to say nothing of that heavenly figure of the Magdalen, in the same picture, kissing the feet of the infant Saviour. Some have ridiculed, some have excused this strange combination of inaccuracies; but is it less one of the divinest pieces of sentiment and poetry that ever breathed and glowed from the canvas? You remember too the famous Nativity, by some Neapolitan painter, who had placed Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the back ground?-In these and a hundred other instances, no one seems to feel that the apparent absurdity involves the highest truth, and that the sacred beings thus represented, if once allowed as objects of faith and worship, are eternal under every aspect, and independent of all time and all locality. So it is with Shakspeare and his anachronisms; the learned scorn of Johnson and some of his brotherhood of commentators, and the eloquent defence of Schlegel, seem in this case both superfluous. If he chose to make the Delphic oracle, and Giulio Romano cotemporary-what does it signify? he committed no anachronisms of character. He has not metamorphosed Cleopatra into a turtle-dove, nor Katharine of Arragon into a sentimental heroine. He is true to the spirit and generally even to the letter of history: where he deviates from the latter, the reason always may be found in some higher beauty and more universal truth.

ALDA.

I have proved this, I think, by placing parallel with the dramatic character all the historic testimony I could col

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lect relative to Constance, Cleopatra, Katharine of Arragon, &c.

MEDON.

Analyzing the character of Cleopatra must have been something like catching a meteor by the tail, and making it sit for its picture.

ALDA.

Something like it, in truth; but those of Miranda and Ophelia were more embarrassing, because they seemed to defy all analysis. It was like intercepting the dew-drop or the snow-flake ere it fell to earth, and subjecting it to a chemical process.

MEDON.

Some one said the other day that Shakspeare had never drawn a coquette. What is Cleopatra but the empress and type of all the coquettes that ever were-or are? But now for the moral.

The moral!-of what.

ALDA.

MEDON.

Of your book. It has a moral, I suppose.

ALDA.

It has indeed a very deep one, which those who seek will find. If now I have answered all your considerations and objections, and sufficiently explained my own views, may I proceed?

MEDON.

If you please-I am now prepared to listen in earnest.

We hear it asserted, not seldom by way of compliment to us women, that intellect is of no sex. If this mean that the same faculties of mind are common to men and women, it is true; in any other signification it appears to me false, and the reverse of a compliment. The intellect of woman bears the same relation to that of man as her physical organization; it is inferior in power, and different in kind. That certain women have surpassed certain men in bodily strength or intellectual energy, does not contradict the general principle founded in nature. The essential and in

variable distinction appears to me this in men the intellectual faculties exist more self-poised and self-directedmore independent of the rest of the character, than we ever find them in women, with whom talent, however predominant, is in a much greater degree modified by the sympathies and moral qualities.

In thinking over all the distinguished women I can at this moment call to mind, I recollect but one, who, in the exercise of all rare talent, belied her sex, but the moral qualities had been first perverted.* It is from not knowing, or not allowing, this general principle, that men of genius have committed some signal mistakes; they have given us exquisite and just delineations of the more peculiar characteristics of women, as modesty, grace, tenderness; and when they have attempted to portray them with the powers common to both sexes, as wit, energy, intellect, they have plundered in some respect; they could form no conception of intellect which was not masculine, and therefore have either suppressed the feminine attributes altogether and drawn coarse caricatures, or they have made them completely artificial. Women distinguished for wit may sometimes appear masculine and flippant, but the cause must be sought elsewhere than in nature, who disclaims all such. Hence the witty and intellectual ladies of our comedies and novels are all in the fashion of some particular time;

* Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian artist of the seventeenth century, painted one or two pictures, considered admirable as works of art, of which the subjects are the most vicious and barbarous conceivable. I remember one of these in the gallery of Florence, which I looked at once, but once, and wished then as I do now, the privilege of burning it to ashes.

Lucy Ashton, in the Bride of Lammermoor, may be placed next to Desdemona; Diana Vernon is (comparatively) a failure, as every woman will allow; while the masculine lady Geraldine, in Miss Edgeworth's tale of Ennui, and the intellectual Corinne, are consistent, essential women: the distinction is more easily felt than analyzed