its mastery over itself. Yet the success of such an experiment will depend on the age and amount of sensibility possessed by those on whom it is made. Sometimes the consciousness of extreme guilt will give to waking nearly all the characteristics of sleep: the man is no longer master of his own thoughts. He is the passive victim of phantasms and forebodings, dread of he knows not what comes upon him, the objects which surround him are not what he sees, but a chaos of ghastly images which goad and torture him to the verge of madness. Such was the state of Caligula as he ran to and fro and howled at night through the vast arcades and apartments of the imperial palace at Rome, and of Charles the Ninth in Paris after the massacre. Sometimes the half-formed resolution to perpetrate some dreadful thing haunts the brain like the remembrance of crime. Banquo's thoughts on the very night of the murder were busied with some design analogous to that of Macbeth; what it was Shakespeare has not explained, though he clearly suggests its bloody nature.

Groping with his son through the darkness of the castle courts, he says

How goes the night, boy?

Fle. The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.

Ban. And she goes down at twelve.

Fle.

I take 't, 'tis later, sir.

Ban. Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out. Take thee that too.

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose! Give me my sword.

He demands back his weapon because he thinks that the moment for the carrying out of the design

suggested to him in sleep has arrived. His better angel, however, or his reluctance to obey the promptings of nature, prevails as the probable object of his perplexity appears suddenly before him.

Enter Macbeth, and a Servant with a torch.

I have said 'probable' because the subject is left by Shakespeare involved in uncertainty, though we discern clearly that the words of the weird sisters on the blasted heath wrought like venom in the minds of both generals till effaced by death. Banquo's crime meditated, though not perpetrated, was stifled in the womb by the ruthless celerity of Macbeth, who had won the crown, but read in the moody bearing of his partner in ambition that which made him feel on what a giddy and slippery steep he stood. The Erinnyes were busy with his slumbers, and even the realities of the waking world failed to blunt their stings.

Lady M. How now, my lord! why do you keep alone,
Of sorriest fancies your companions making,

Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
With them they think on? Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what's done is done.
Mac. We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it:

She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice

Remains in danger of her former tooth.

But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,

Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy.

Could Macbeth, however, when thus arraigned nightly in the court of his own conscience by Nemesis, have

pleaded truly that in all he did he had only yielded obedience to what Ulrici calls intrinsic necessity,' he must have silenced the accusing goddess. It was because, in the language of law, he felt conscious that the crime he had perpetrated was his own act and deed that he could put forward nothing to bar judgment, but on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.' No babbling of weird sisters, no sophistry about jumping the life to come, no satisfaction derived from having placed on his brow the golden round of sovereignty, no brilliant memories of the past, no gratifications springing from the present exercise of power, no soothing influence of hope in the time to come, could scare away from his couch or from his brain those resistless ministers of vengeance that spring to life simultaneously with guilt. The tyrant was now able to appreciate the meed he had earned by his deeds:

I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere and yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

If language could suffice to direct the current of human action, Shakespeare's would; it is more potent and persuasive than a thousand homilies. He had weighed in the balance all places, positions, and honours, and found them, apart from personal worth, to be mere dross and chaff. It was said by a successful theologian that Shakespeare and the Bible had made him Archbishop of York; it were better still could students affirm the same influences had made them honest men.

We have already seen that nature effects different purposes through the agency of sleep: sometimes, as in the case of Banquo, stimulating to evil; more frequently, as in the case of Macbeth, inflicting chastisement for evil committed. But in Shakespeare, as in life, both ill-doers aud well-doers seek this balm of hurt minds as an asylum where, as in death, the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. When, however, it is sought with this view by those who are stained with blood, it stands perseveringly aloof and will not be wooed to associate with them till it has been purchased by protracted agony. Henry the Fourth affects to be in doubt why this half-brother of death will not answer his prayers; whereas it was, in truth, a sceptred shadow whom he, to gain his place had sent to peace, that stood between him and the gate of sleep. When he put, therefore, the ensuing question his conscience muttered the proper answer:

O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Had anyone whispered in his ears the name of Richard the Second, he would have understood the real state of the case. He is not, however, in search of truth, but, with the habitual sophistry of a guilty mind, tries to shift off to the circumstances of his condition what in truth belongs to his own doings. Follow him in the review of those whom sleep visits, and note with what acuteness he points out the difference between them and himself:

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee

And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,

Under the canopies of costly state,

And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell ?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king?

Could Henry have communed with himself in language such as this, it might have reconciled him to sleeplessness or to anything but the consciousness of guilt. But this idea he strives to keep far from him; it is the responsibility of his position that keeps him awake:

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

No! Henry, the fault is not in the crown, but in the remembrance of the murder that placed it on your head. An innocent king may sleep as well as any peasant in his dominions. Titus pillowed his head on the blessings of millions, which sent up at the same time a sweet-smelling savour to his soul, and made his dreams Elysium. Everyone spoke of him as the delight of mankind, and when he died there was not a dry eye in the empire. If you have bedabbled your