For them the gracious Duncan have I murder'd; Antony twice defied Cæsar to single combat; and Cæsar, on very good considerations, no doubt, as often declined these challenges. Shakspeare found this circumstance of the life of the Triumvir, with that but now quoted, in Sir Thomas North; and, therefore, could not believe that Antony was personally afraid of Cæsar. Antony, in his letters, charged Octavius with disgraceful flight in the first battle of Mutina :"Antonius eum (Cæsarem scil.) fugisse scribit; ac, sine paludamento equoque, post biduum demum apparuisse."-Suet. Oct. Cæs. cap. x.-Whether Shakspeare knew this anecdote, or not, cannot now be ascertained: it is very possible that he might; for Holland's translation of Suetonius appeared in 1606; and to the month of August, in this year, Mr. Malone proposes to fix the production of Macbeth; though there is ground for thinking that this play is not of so early a date: However, giving the play and the translation to the same year, we Given to the common enemy of man, To make them kings. The seed of Banquo kings! may still, like staunch commentators, insist, that it is most likely the translation was published much earlier in the year than Macbeth;—and, surely, that our author might thus have read Holland's work, could, of all persons, with least grace be denied by Mr. Steevens, who has laboriously diffused Shakspeare's thirty-six plays through one-andtwenty volumes, to no other purpose, apparently, but that of proving him acquainted with (it would, certainly, be exaggeration, to say) every English book that had passed the press down to his time. As a profound statesman, Octavius is celebrated by all the Historians who write of him; they are not so unanimous on the subject of his military prowess; on which, indeed, some of them have not hesitated to cast a slur of doubt. The lover of Cleopatra sunk before the fortune of his more prudent competitor for empire; but, in the most triumphant time of Cæsar's prosperity, neither calumny nor flattery was ever base or broad enough, Rather than so,-Come, fate, into the list, In this soliloquy, Macbeth considers that, after all the guilt he has waded through in order to ascend the throne, he is still in the perpetual danger of being hurled from it; he weighs the causes of that danger; to impeach the personal intrepidity of the Second in command to Julius in the battle of Pharsalia, and the generous Conqueror of the Republic on the plains of Philippi,— "Cum fracta virtus, et minaces Turpe solum tetigêre mento." Antony feared Octavius as a political, not as a personal enemy; and this is exactly the light in which Macbeth regards Banquo,-as a rival for the sovereignty. * Macbeth, Act iii. Sc. 1. and determines by the removal of the persons who seem appointed to depose him, to take the only certain means of assuring the crown to himself, and his posterity. I have, he says, possessed myself of the supreme power: But to what avail, since, in an instant, it may be wrested from me? Banquo is impatient to be the father of a king; and there reigns in his very nature a royalty that seems to realize his expectations: He is not only a soldier of undaunted enterprise, but so consummate a politician, that, should he conspire against me, he will infallibly carry his designs successfully into execuThere lives no other man, tion. whose attempts 1 fear; but his good genius holds as high an ascendant over mine, as, it is said, Cæsar's did over that of Mark Antony. Nor are his pretensions to be apprehended only on account of his natural endowments; they are emboldened too by the assurances of prophecy: Hearing me saluted King by the Weird Sisters, he bade them speak to him; they obeyed; and hailed him-Father to a line of Kings. Upon my head they placed a crown, and put a sceptre in my hand, not to be transmitted to my own blood, but to be torn away by the unlineal succession of his children. If so, I have committed crimes that must embitter |