and who is even tame on such an occasion in calling upon heaven. It is also a reproach, so frequent in Shakspere, of heaven for its indifference to man when called upon. He is fully aware of her mortality—she's dead as earth: nothing can paint death stronger or more enduring. Lear says, what was true of Albany :

A plague upon you, murd'rous traitors all!

I might have sav'd her; now she's gone for ever!
When Kent asks if Lear recollects him, as his servant
Caius, he says, 'He's dead and rotten:'-

And my poor fool is hang'd. No, no, no life.
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never-

Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, Sir.

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there-

He dies at the end of this speech. He arraigns the indifference of Providence to individual life-which alike kills or preserves the precious and the worthless without speciality. He has no idea that the good, too good for this, may be taken to a better world-nor expects, on dying, to see his Cordelia again. He takes leave of her in the most reiterated and emphatic strain of human language. Edgar, with his characteristic love of life, tries to revive Lear. Kent exclaims :

Vex not his ghost. O let him pass. He hates him
That would upon the rack of this rough world
Stretch him out longer.

The religious liberties Shakspere has taken throughout this play, he palliates and defends in the last speech in it. Albany speaks the valedictory words, and retrospectively alludes to the sentiments of the principal characters thus :

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

As we have remarked before, Shakspere shows sympathy with extraordinary villany-such as is exhibited in the cha

racter of Edmund-we are therefore inclined to suppose he did with his irreligious sentiments. The only religious character, Albany, yielding to the sisters, excusing his compliance he makes contemptible. The impiety of Gloster made Mrs. Griffith, who wrote on the morality of Shakspere, and coupled with it religion, wonder how Shakspere could have expressed such sentiments. One such instance exhibits the tendency of a man's mind. But it is not singular in Shakspere.

MACBETH.

IN Othello, Shakspere pronounced the judgment of reason against witchcraft having any agency in the actions of men. In Macbeth he takes a period and a country where belief in such supernatural workings might be admitted. But the whole of the play goes to discredit them; the witches are not made to do anything more than reason might teach; they might begin with an actual truth of which they had information; they might trust for success in the rest of the materials they had to work upon; and that, in them, the hope itself would work out its own fulfilment. As to their prophecies, they are those which always find out completion; they fit badly; but events will meet words, and the ingenuity of man is at exercise to fulfil what is spoken of the future.

Having profited by the barbarism of the age to introduce what is supernatural, Shakspere has made Macbeth a modern philosopher. The witches merely represent motives and causes; Macbeth would exercise free-will, but he is made to bend to a superior fate. But we are sure that, amidst supernaturalism and necessity, Shakspere wished to show that, not only in the physical world nature guided our actions, but in the moral world there was a system of morality which favoured the right and punished the wrong. This was the moral of the play; a natural moral, which he has carried on throughout in contradistinction to any religious. He shows supernaturalism working for evil; religion not preventing evil; but morality predisposing to good, counteracting evil, almost succeeding in establishing right; and if disordered in its general rules, readjusting itself, proving itself a true prophet and providence from the beginning to the end. We meet with all this in the first act, for we believe Shakspere wishes always at the commencement to lay down the principles of his plays, and let them be the guides to the termination.

Macbeth is first spoken of by the soldier as disdaining fortune.' What a material address Banquo utters to the weird sisters! He is not a believer in witches; he has a philosophy of his own, that all things are in matter or time; there is no directing them; at best anything supernatural can only see into them. The passage seems drawn from Lucretius, given to keep people in mind of nature amidst these seeming departures from it. Can we suppose that Shakspere puts forward such philosophy, on such an occasion, not at all suiting it or the character of a kilted savage—and was not, himself speaking?

If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear

Your favours nor your hate.

The very words are those which Lucretius employs in delivery of his atheism. Macbeth calls the speech of the witches, prophetic greetings. But Banquo speaks in a very different and sceptical spirit of all supernaturalism—the real remains, the ideal is but a bubble.

Ban. The earth hath bubbles, as the water has;
And these are of them. Whither are they vanish'd?

He will not believe, though he was an eye and ear witness, and makes it a question whether those who believe in things contrary to experience are not deprived of their reason.

Ban. Were such things here as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten of the insane root,

That takes the reason prisoner?

He gives way, however, to the idea of the devil on the first fulfilment of their prophecies, but gives the philosophy of them in saying they begin by success in trifles, and that gives them credit for and makes people work out greater results for them, and that Macbeth's trust in one fulfilment will probably enkindle him to achieving the rest, from the earldom to the crown. Macbeth thinks it cannot be ill because it is true, but it cannot be good because it is against the use of nature. What a satire upon some religions, and what a good for mankind, if, instead of trusting to what

appears a supernatural truth, and may indirectly be one, they allowed themselves only to be swayed by facts, and did not think that ever could be good which was against nature. The very thought of evil has made Macbeth from a happy a miserable man-he has lost all his peace of mind. He becomes, who did not care for fortune, a suppliant slave to chance.

Macb. If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir.

Come what come may,

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

Malcolm's account of the execution of Cawdor gives an opportunity to Shakspere to introduce those sentiments regarding death, and give an example of them, which we have so often noticed in his writings: :

Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving of it. He died
As one that had been studied in his death,
To throw away the dearest thing he ow'd,

As 'twere a careless trifle.

There is no mention of the religious importance of the passage from one life to another; nothing, in leaving, of the consideration of what is coming; he is praised who has studied to think life a careless trifle. This is not Christian, but it is the sentiment of one who has studied in a heathen school, and we see it when we find the Roman plays immediately succeeding Macbeth. The soliloquy of Macbeth, on hearing his king appoint his son successor to the throne, resembles, in some points, Iago's meditations, bringing to light his hidden wickedness.

Lady Macbeth, on her entrance on the stage, at once gives the excellent nature of her husband, which has begun, and is to be perverted by surrounding circumstances. Superstition leads the way in the letter she reads from Macbeth, giving an account of his interview with the witches. She thinks little of the witches, much more of the material circumstances favourable and unfavourable to her ambition. No thanks to the supernatural ministers, no invocation to them for the future: