and conceits. It is an answer to the question, What is life like? What can we say about it now?

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To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Enter a Messenger.

Thou com'st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly."

Has this any relation to true feeling? Do men of any feeling, whose hearts are touched, fall to improvising poems like this, filled with fanciful images, when great sorrows come upon them? This speech is full of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." There is no accent from the heart in it. It is elaborate, poetic, cold-blooded. "Life is a candle," "a poor player," "a walking shadow," "a tale told by an idiot." We have his customary alliterations: "petty pace," "dusty death," "day to day;" his love of repeating the same word, "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," just as we have "If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well it were done quickly;" and his "Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep, sleep, that knits up," etc.; "Sleep no more! Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more." He cannot

forget himself enough to cease to be ingenious in his phrases. As a poem this speech is striking; as an expression of feeling it is perfectly empty. At the end of it he has quite forgotten the death of his wife; he is only employed in piling up figure after figure to personify life. What renders the unreality of this still more striking is the sudden change which comes over him upon the entrance of the messenger. In an instant he stops short in his poem, and his tone becomes at once decided and harsh; his wife's death has passed utterly out of his mind. When the messenger tells him that Birnam Wood is beginning to move, with a sudden burst of rage he turns upon him, calls him liar and slave, and threatens to hang him alive till famine cling him, if his report prove to be incorrect. This is the real Macbeth. From this time forward he never alludes to Lady Macbeth ; but, in a strange condition of superstitious fear and soldierly courage, he calls his men to arms, and goes out crying,

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Blow, wind! come, wrack!

At least we 'll die with harness on our back."

And this throughout is the character of Macbeth's utterances. He is not like Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite; he is a poetical and sentimental hypocrite. His phrases and figures of speech have no root in his real life; they are only veneered upon them. "His words fly up, his thoughts remain below." When he is poetical he is never in earnest. Sometimes his speeches are merely oratorical, and made

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from habit and for effect; sometimes they are hypocritical, and used to conceal his real intentions; and sometimes they are the expressions of an inflamed and diseased imagination stimulated by superstition. But they are generally bombastic and swelling in tone, and are so intended to be. His habit of making speeches and inventing curious conceits is so strong, that he even unpacks his heart with words " when alone, so as to leave himself free and direct to act. Thus, in one of his famous soliloquies, mark the unreal quality of all the pretended feeling, the mixture of immorality, bombast, and hypocrisy, the assonances and alliterations, the plays upon words, the extravagant figures, all showing the excitability of the brain and not of the heart:

"If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come."

Then, after some questions about killing his guest, his kinsman, his king, which would seem honest, but for what comes after and for the utter reckless immorality which has gone before these words, his imagination excites itself, and runs into a wild and extravagant figure which means nothing. Duncan's virtues, he says,

"Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.”

No sooner does he begin to swell and alliterate again than he goes wild :

"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind."

This is pure rant, and intended to be so. It is the product of an unrestrained imagination which exhausts itself in the utterance. But it neither comes from the heart nor acts upon the heart.

Again, in the soliloquy of the air-drawn dagger, the superstitious, visionary Macbeth, who always projects his fancies into figures and phantoms, after addressing this

"false creation

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,"

falls at once into poetic declamation about the night, and indulges himself in strange images and personifications. A man about to commit a murder who invents these conceits must be a poetical villain :

"Now witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd murder,

Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost."

Can anything be more extraordinary and elaborate than this pressing of one conceit upon another? Wither'd murder has a sentinel, the wolf, who howls his watch, and who with stealthy

pace strides with Tarquin's ravishing strides like a ghost! Shakespeare makes no other character systematically talk like this.

But the fumes of the brain pass, and leave the stern, determined man of action:

"Whiles I threat, he lives;

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven, or to hell."

We have no such rant as this in Lady Macbeth. In the scenes of the murder, she does not befool herself with visions and poetry. She is practical, and her attention is given solely to the real facts about her. Contrast the simple language in which she speaks, while waiting for Macbeth, with his previous rhodomontade. Agitated, in great emotion, listening for sounds, doubting whether some mischance may not have befallen to prevent the murder, she speaks in short, broken sentences; but she does not liken her husband to Tarquin, and say now is the time when "witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate's offerings," nor employ this interval in making a poem full of conceits.

Macbeth goes in to the king, and commits the murder; no scruples of any kind prevent him. But when that is secure, he has a superstitious fit, and imagines phantom-voices, that talk as no phantoms ever did before. Still he is a coward in the presence of phantoms, and will not go back. The deed has been done, and ghosts alarm him.