treat.

Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou oppos'd, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last: Before my body

I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff;

And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough."

[Exeunt, fighting.

Flourish. Re-enter, with Drum and Colours, MALCOLM, old SIWARD,

ROSSE, LENOX, ANGUS, CATHNess, Menteth, and Soldiers.

Mal. I would the friends we miss were safe arriv'd.
Siw. Some must go off: and yet, by these I see,

So great a day as this is cheaply bought.

Mal. Macduff is missing, and your noble son.

Rosse. Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt:

He only liv'd but till he was a man ;

The which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd

In the unshrinking station where he fought,

But like a man he dy'd.

Siw. Then he is dead?

APPENDIX.

y Mr. Collier's publication of certain manuscript alterations discovered in a copy of the f 1632, the public are made his debtors for some very sure and admirable corrections of misprints in the works of Shakespeare. It must, nevertheless, be admitted that his zeal cause of his author has, in many instances, thrust aside his more sober judgment, and d him to give the sanction of his countenance to indisputably erroneous innovations on cient text. Thus, in the following sentence (7. 381):

"Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

S. annotator substitutes blankness for blanket. But what general impediment would blankness >se to the broader operations of sight, to countenance the intimation of contracted and vision denoted in the qualifying phrase "peep through?"

ollier's manuscript puts bleaded for bladed; and it is indeed well known that what is nly called bladed corn is not liable to be lodged or destroyed by storms. But it is possible hakespeare may have used this phrase to denote that condition of the corn when the t having burst forth, lies yet enfolded in the blade; and if otherwise, still even so the stency with ordinary fact would not warrant a conjectural interference with the text, since have been the author's intention to indicate a supernatural destructiveness and violence pest, by specifying under its effects, "corn that is blasted before it is grown up." That hilated in its earliest promise. The annotator appears to have been unaware of the scope speech; for further on he changes slope into stoop, in the annexed passage (7. 1496):

"Though palaces and pyramids do slope

Their heads to their foundations," &c.

acbeth is imagining the utmost exaggeration of havoc that a hurricane can effect; and the ope is employed with premeditation by the poet, as it is intended to express, imperatively, fall of the objects designated, entire and at once,-overturned from their foundations. is the phrase," stoop their heads," might signify a fall of the top only, or a more gradual

An equally injurious alteration is made in the subsequent passage (7. 1610):

"No boasting like a fool;

This deed I'll do before this purpose cool:

But no more sights!"

At this point in the tragedy, Macbeth has been seeking to extinguish his ever-torturing apprehensions by inquiries into the future, through the medium of forbidden and supernatural agencies; and, wildly distracted by the painful nature of the excitement to which he has been subjected, he has cursed alike his act and his instruments:

"Let this pernicious hour, Stand aye accursed in the calendar!"

"Infected be the air whereon they ride;

And damn'd all those that trust them!"

These fierce denunciations sufficiently proclaim how greatly the visions he has seen of futurity are oppressing him. Whilst in this phrensied condition, he is informed that Macduff, the person against whom his fears have been mostly directed, is fled from his reach; and he decrees, in the ravings of his wrath, to

"give to the edge o' the sword

His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line."

"But" (he adds) " but no more sights!

He has already looked so far into the events of time, as to see, in the entire extermination of his hard-earned greatness, how vain are these harrowing strifes from which he cannot now recede; and, in this exclamation of a moment, his hideously predominant sense of the fruitlessness of the sufferings into which he has been betrayed, by the unholy promptings of witchcraft, is fully disclosed, in one concentrated phrase, to the comprehension of the hearer. Being henceforth excluded from hope in the future, he determines to revenge his disappointment by the headlong gratification of every sudden desire that arises in his maddened appetite for relief; but he cannot endure to contemplate the futility of their ultimate results, or to raise farther the veil which hides from him the dreaded hostility of time to come. From this he peremptorily recoils.

This fearfully significant ejaculation, the manuscript annotator has altered into "But no more flights!" But the only flights, from which Macbeth had anything to dread, had already been successfully accomplished. None remained to fly, but helpless victims for his vengeance, at once so obviously incapable of flight, and immaterial to his graver projects, that the only chance of their escape he conceives it necessary to guard against, is the extinction of his own determination to destroy them, before he shall appoint the time for its execution:

This deed I'll do before this purpose cool."

The resolution to act, with difficulty holds its ground before the recent revelation of eventual

nd far from the idea of stopping flights, having undisturbed possession of his thoughts, he ngly recognizes it as staggering, whilst he speaks, before the tyrannous influence of the ominant impression to which he by compulsion reverts:-" But no more sights!

he word but, which commences the phrase, should alone have preserved it from the proposed ion; since it indicates a return to some previous subject of the speaker's apprehension, of a deduction or consequence of the threat that more immediately precedes it. nother erroneous substitution is made in the following metaphor (7. 2079):

"He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause

Within the belt of rule."

s, as a distempered body, swollen by disease, cannot be limited to its natural operations, icted to the dimensions prescribed as proper to health; so Macbeth's cause being evil, he pable of restraining its disordered influences within such appointed bounds, as may confine within the compass of command. The metaphor is taken from the use of a diet-belt as a regimen. The annotator writes course, instead of cause. Now the elements of a cause

ined and limited, constituting a present and completed idea. But what sense or propriety found in a figure which refers to buckling a man's course, which is future, indefinite, rily forward, within a belt? This may be coerced or impeded, but cannot be belted. xceptions have been taken to the repetition of the same sound, in the subsequent passage 9):

"Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart."

uplication shows the idea more definitely oppressive; denoting the contemplation of the to be chained to the one changeless sensation of his guilt, which enforces and holds his

n.

NORWICH: PRINTED BY CHARLES MUSKETT, OLD HAYMARKET. ́ ́