How now! ye secret, foul, and midnight hags,

What is't ye do?

is answered,

A deed without a name.

The witches of the forest are as important in the tragedy of Macbeth, as the Eumenides in the drama of Æschylus; but our Poet is infinitely more dexterous and judicious in the conduct of their part. The secret, foul, and midnight hags are not introduced into the castle of Macbeth; they never appear but in their allotted region of folitude and night, nor act beyond their sphere of ambiguous prophecy, and malignant forcery. The Eumenides, snoring in the temple of Apollo, and then appearing as evidences against Orestes in the Areopagus, feem both acting out of their sphere, and below their character. It was the appointed office of the venerable goddesses, to avenge the crimes unwhipt of justice, not to demand the public trial of guilty men. They must lose much of the fear and reverence in which they were held

for

for their fecret influence on the mind, and the terrors they could inflict on criminal confcience, when they were represented as obliged to have recourse to the ordinary method of revenge, by being witnesses and pleaders in a court of justice, to obtain the corporal punishment of the offender. Indeed, it is poffible, that the whole story of this play might be allegorical, as thus, that Oreftes, haunted by the terrors which pursue the guilty mind, confessed his crime to the Areopagus, with all the aggravating circumstances remorse suggested to him, from a pious defire to expiate his offence, by fubmitting to whatever sentence this refpectable assembly should pronounce for that purpose. The oracle which commanded him to put Clytemnestra to death, would plead for him with his judges; their voices being equal for abfolving or punishing, wifdom gives her vote for abfolving him.

The sentiment that appears so odd in the mouth of the goddess, from these confiderations, that she is little affected by the circumstance of Clytemnestra's relation to the murderer, because she herself had no mother, means only that justice is not governed by any affection or perfonal confideration, but acts by an invariable and general rule. If the oracle commanded, and the laws justified the act of Oreftes, by appointing the next in blood to avenge the murder, then other circumstances of a special and inferior kind, were not to have any weight. I am inclined to think this tragedy is a mixture of History and Allegory. Æfchylus affected the allegorical manner so much, as to form a tragedy, called the Balance, upon the allegory in Homer, of Jupiter's weighing the fates of Hector and Achilles *; and it is apparent, that the Prometheus of this author, is the ancient allegory of Prometheus wrought into a drama. Prometheus makes his first appearance with two fymbolical perfons, Violence and Force, which are, apparently, of the Poet's fiction. Pere Brumoy intimates a suspicion that this tragedy is an allegory, but imagines it alludes to Xerxes or Darius, because it abounds with reflections on tyranny. To flatter the republican spirit, all the Grecian tragedies are full of such reflections. But an oblique censure on the Persian monarch could not have excused the direct imputations thrown on the character of Jupiter, if the circumstances of the story had been taken in a literal sense; nor can it be supposed that the Athenians would have endured the most violent affronts to have been offered to the character of that deity to whom they every day offered facrifice. An allegory being sometimes a mere physical hypothefis, might without impiety be treated with freedom. - It is probable that many allegories brought from the hieroglyphic land of Egypt, were, in the groffer times of Greece, literally understood by the vulgar; but, in' more philofophic ages, were again transmuted into allegory; which will account for the mythology of the Greeks and Ægyptians varying greatly, but

but still preserving such a resemblance as shews them to be derived from the fame origin.

Jealous of the neighbouring states, and ever attentive to the glory and interest of their commonwealth, an Athenian audience listened with pleasure to any circumstances, in their theatrical entertainments, which reflected honour on their country. The institution of the Areopagus by the express commands of Minerva; a perpetual amity, promised by Orestes, between Argos and Athens, in the tragedy of the Eumenides, and a prophecy of Prometheus, which threw a lustre on the author of the race of the Heraclidæ, were circumstances, without question, sedulously fought by the Poet, and favorably received by the Spectator. But though such subjects might be chosen, or invented, as would introduce some favorable incidents, or flattering reflections, this intention did not always reign through the whole drama.

It