Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!

Lady M. What do you mean?

Macb. Still it cried, Sleep no more! to all the house;

Lady M. Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane,
You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things.

When we consider how literally this fancied prediction of sleeplessness is fulfilled, as we hear from Lady Macbeth's own lips-" You lack the season of all natures, sleep,”—while the stimulus to "the heatoppressed brain" goes on so fearfully accumulating,— is it wonderful that the very peculiar combination of circumstances under which, at his royal banquet, he proposes the health of his second victim, should irresistibly force upon his vision another "false creation -a Banquo "of the mind?" It would be absolutely inconsistent with all we have known of him before, that this should not be the case. He takes his seat at table in a state of the most anxiously excited, momentary expectation of receiving the news of that second assassination, which is to deliver him from "the affliction of those terrible dreams that shake him nightly"—to "cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps him pale." The news is brought him, and immediately his horrors of the other class, those of retrospection upon his own treacherous and sanguinary deed, assail him with redoubled force. However, with his usual over-eagerness to obviate suspicion, he ventures upon one of his speeches of double-refined hypocritical profession :—

Here had we now our country's honour roof'd,
Were the grac'd person of our Banquo present,
Whom may I rather challenge for unkindness
Than pity for mischance!

Here the speaker miscalculates his powers of selfcommand. The very violence which the framing of this piece of falsehood compels him to do to his imagination, makes the image of the horrid fact rush the more irresistibly upon his "heat-oppressed brain.”

It could hardly be otherwise than that the effort to
say,
"Were the graced person of our Banquo present,"
&c., must force upon his very eyes the aspect of his
victim's person as he now vividly conceives it from
the murderer's description, with severed throat, and
"twenty trenched gashes on his head." The complete
hallucination by which Macbeth takes his own "false
creation" for a real, objective figure, apparent to all
eyes, is but a repetition, under more aggravated ex-
citement than ever, of what, we have seen, had taken
place in him several times before, in the previous
course of the drama. In like manner, the second
apparition in the course of the banquet, is produced
to Macbeth's vision by a second violent effort of his
tongue to contradict his feelings and the fact, with yet
more subtle falsehood than before:-
:-

I drink to the general joy of the whole table,
And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss;

Would he were here!

Again, we see, by his own descriptive words, that the apparition is no ghost at all-nothing but Macbeth's morbidly vivid consciousness of the actual aspect of Banquo's corpse, as contrasted with the living Banquo whose presence he affects to desire :

Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

How this public exhibition of his uncontrollable frenzy operates upon the state of Macbeth's fortunes, is admirably indicated in one of his own characteristic ruminations, at the end of his first paroxysm:-

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purg'd the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd,
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end: but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,

And push us from our stools. This is more strange
Than such a murder is !

Herein we see expressed, at once, Macbeth's character and his destiny. Murderers before him had been able to keep their own counsel; but his feverish imagination does in effect raise his victim from under ground to push him from his stool, by letting the murder out through his own abstracted ravings. His lady has only just time to hurry out their guests, before he utters that concluding exclamation which does all but explicitly confess the fact of Banquo's

assassination:

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
Augurs, and understood relations, have,

By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth
The secret'st man of blood.

This second paroxysm over, his very consciousness that his loss of self-possession has betrayed him into awakening general suspicion, excites his apprehensions of danger from others to the utmost pitch of exaggeration. He had said of Banquo, before giving orders for his murder, "There is none but he, whose being I do fear." But now, he not only speaks of Macduff as the next great object of his distrust

How sayst thou-that Macduff denies his person

At our great bidding?

but he has begun to suspect everybody

:

There's not a one of them, but in his house
I keep a servant feed.

Now, since Macbeth's grand maxim of security is, to destroy everybody whom he does suspect, he no longer limits his views to individual assassinations, but is launched at once upon an ocean of sanguinary atrocity :

For mine own good,

All causes shall give way; I am in blood
Stept in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er :

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;

Which must be acted ere they may be scann❜d.

The savage slaughter of Macduff's family in revenge for his own escape, is but the first of these "strange things," the series of which is expressed in those words of Macduff to Malcolm:

Each new morn,

New widows howl; new orphans cry; new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds

As if it felt with Scotland, and yell'd out

Like syllable of dolour;

and more particularly in those of Rosse to Macduff:Alas, poor country;

Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot

Be call'd our mother, but our grave: where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;

Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air,
Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems

A modern ecstacy; the dead man's knell

Is there scarce ask'd for whom; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,

Dying or ere they sicken!

Macduff.

Oh, relation

Too nice, and yet too true!

And now comes the realisation of Macbeth's own presentiment expressed in the soliloquy preceding his final resolution to perpetrate the murder of Duncan :But, in these cases,

We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

-

The fulfilment, in his own case, is thus described in the words of one of his revolted thanes :

Angus.

Now does he feel

His secret murders sticking on his hands:
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands, move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief;—

while from abroad

The English power is near, led on by Malcolm,
His uncle Siward, and the good Macduff:

Revenges burn in them; for their dear causes
Would to the bleeding and the grim alarm
Excite the mortified man!

Finding himself almost bereft of human support in his usurped dominion, Macbeth, in his purely selfish clinging to self-preservation, is now thrown, for exclusive reliance, upon his "metaphysical aid " implied in the predictions of the weird sisters.'

Here, therefore, it becomes necessary to consider the nature and operation of that preternatural agency, the use of which by the poet stamps this drama with so peculiar a character.

3.-MACBETH AND THE WEIRD SISTERS.

In a merely picturesque and poetical view, the weird sisters, with their anonymous personality, their nameless deeds, and their equivocal oracles,-with their aspect wild, and withered, and lightning-seared, as just descended from the thunder-cloud,—form, as it were, a harmonizing link between the moral blackness of the principal subject and the tempestuous heaven that lours over it. But far more important as well as interesting it is, to trace the great moral purpose designed and effected by the dramatist, in developing by this means, more fully and strikingly than could have been done by merely human machinery, the evil tendencies inherent in the individual nature of his hero.

The first indications that are given us of the character of these mysterious beings, in the living and speaking drama, which is what we must constantly endeavour to keep before our mind's eye in studying the works of Shakespeare, we find in the external figure under which they present themselves to the