agitation will not let him contemplate for an in-. stant the aspect of the murdered. Lady Macbeth, on the contrary, having real remorse, does recoil at the last moment from the very act to which she had been using such violent and continued efforts to work herself up; but, being totally free from her husband's irritability of fancy, can go deliberately to look upon the sanguinary work which her own hand had shrunk from performing."

True it is that it was Lady Macbeth's intention to have perpetrated the murder unaided by her husband. Distrustful of his resolution, while aware of the conscientious scruples by which he was beset, she would, no doubt, have acted on her original determination to commit the murder with her own hand, if it had not been for the resemblance to her father of the sleeping monarch. By such a proceeding, as far as moral determination could have effected her design-she would have rendered failure impossible. In consequence, however, of that resemblance, she is deterred from taking the business into her own hands, and leaves its performance with the irresolute Macbeth. But, although,

owing to the peculiarity of her husband's nature, failure, under such circumstances, becomes possible, Lady Macbeth does not anticipate the failure, but the successful issue of his murderous attempt. The consequence of her recoiling from the act of assassination is not that the deed remains undone. While, from a natural repugnance to assassinate the man who resembles her father in his sleep, Lady Macbeth shrinks from the actual perpetration of the murder, she is, all the while, calculating on its performance by another. It is utterly ridiculous, therefore, to assert that "Lady Macbeth, having real remorse, does recoil at the last moment from the very act to which she had been using such violent and continued efforts to work herself up." Her shrinking from that act is no evidence of remorse. The inference from the fact that she recoils, under the peculiar circumstances, from committing the murder with her own hand is, that she has a certain share of the feelings common to humanity, that she is not utterly inhuman, but not that she is remorseful. Had she felt genuine compunction, she would have dissuaded her hus

band from the perpetration of the crime which she had previously prevailed upon him to assent to. Her conduct during the whole of the assassination-scene is 'characterized by the most remorseless determination: while the deliberate heartlessness of her proceeding, notwithstanding the light manner in which the reviewer appears disposed to consider it, we look upon as scarcely paralleled for its iniquity, when, for the purpose of securing her own and her husband's safety, she enters the chamber where lies the bleeding witness of her husband's guilt, and, gazing without a shudder on those lifeless features which bear so striking a resemblance to her father's, besmears with blood the faces of the grooms.

According to the reviewer, Macbeth's last action shows that "he died as he had lived, remorseless."

"When Macduff appears before him," he observes, "it is not compunction that draws from him the confession

'Of all men else I have avoided thee:

But get thee back-my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already!'

H

it is, that the words of the preternatural monitor are still ringing in his ear- Beware Macduffbeware the Thane of Fife!' Compelled to fight, he avails himself of the first pause, while he is yet unwounded, to persuade his antagonist of his invulnerability:

"Thou losest labour:

I bear a charmed life, which must not yield

To one of woman born!'

999

So that, as it is not a feeling of remorse which leads Macbeth to warn his antagonist to forbear from the encounter which he seeks, we are to believe that, for the sake merely of an idle boast, a man as cowardly and treacherous as the reviewer has portrayed Macbeth, would forego the gratification immediately within his reach, of seeing the man whom he most hates and fears, lifeless at his feet. What a preposterous supposition!

We think we have now fulfilled the object we proposed to ourselves at the commencement of the foregoing pages, which was to show wherein we differed from the reviewer in his observations on the character of Macbeth.

Duncan's assassination-the result of circum

stances in which a weak mind with strong passions and little strength of principle was placed

we regard as the prolific source of Macbeth's subsequent enormities; while the sympathy which we experience for the murderer has its origin in our knowledge of those circumstances that first rendered him a criminal; a sympathy which we could not feel were we able to regard him from the very first as an utterly remorseless villain who, of his own free impulses, had plunged headlong into crime.

THE END.

London: W. Stevens, Printer, Bell Yard, Temple Bar.