by the lady towards her husband, so soon as he desists from urging his moral objections to the murder.

The remark that the possibility of defeat, “up to the very completion of their design, seems never to have been absent from her own mind," we are again, we confess, at a loss to reconcile with the notion that Lady Macbeth would rebuke with so much bitterness in another the expression of apprehensions similar to the very fears which she experienced herself.

The reviewer in another place is fairly liable to the charge of inconsistency. Alluding to Macbeth's conduct after he has assassinated Duncan, he remarks-·

"So soon as Macbeth finds himself, for the moment, safe from discovery, he lapses into his old habit of ill-timed rumination upon the nature and circumstances of the act he has just committed, which touch his fearful fancy vividly enough, but his heart not at all."

Presently he observes :

"Through all the rest of this scene he remains lost in his profitless rumination, leaving the

business but half executed, on the completion of which depends, not only the attainment of the object of his ambition, but even his escape from detection as the murderer."

What are we to understand from these passages? that the murderer did or did not consider himself in safety while indulging in his poetical ruminations?

If Macbeth could not have considered himself safe from discovery-and he could not possibly have done so towards the conclusion of the scene occurring immediately after his commission of the murder, neither at its commencement-if, as the reviewer states, he was perpetually looking to his own selfish interests-could he, in reality, have considered his position sufficiently secure as to admit of his indulging without peril to himself in ill-timed ruminations upon the nature and circumstances of the act he had just committed. The fact, then, that at the risk of his detection as the murderer, he does remain lost in his profitless rumination, is inconsistent with the supposition that his actions were uniformly regulated by selfish considerations.

If selfish considerations invariably influenced Macbeth, he surely would not have entered on so profitless a train of meditation until all chances of discovery had been removed, (which, as the business was but half executed, was evidently not the case,) for it is inconceivable that a man as nervously apprehensive of the odium and retribution which might follow the perpetration of his crime, as the reviewer has represented Macbeth to have been, would, for the sake of " the grave amusement afforded to his imagination of taking a poetical view of his own atrocity," have run the risk of being discovered as the murderer.

The reviewer next proceeds to speak of the atrocious conduct of which Macbeth is guilty, after he has assassinated Duncan, in murdering the two sleeping attendants, as well as in assassinating Banquo;-acts which he perpetrates without pausing to deliver any of those highly poetical sentiments in which he had indulged both before and immediately after the murder of his sovereign. The reviewer observes :-"The following scene shows us Macbeth when his paroxysm ensuing upon the act of murder has

quite spent itself, and he has become quite himself again—that is, the cold-blooded, cowardly, and treacherous assassin. Let any one who may have been disposed, with most of the critics, to believe that Shakspeare has delineated Macbeth as a character originally remorseful, will consider that speech of most elaborate, refined, and coldblooded hypocrisy in which, so speedily after his poetical whinings over his own atrocity in murdering Duncan, he alleges his motives for killing the two sleeping attendants.

'Macbeth. O, yet I do repent me of my fury,

That I did kill them.

Macduff. Wherefore did you so?

Macb. Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man :'

&c. &c.

"No; a character like this, we cannot too often repeat, is one purely of the most cowardly selfishness and most remorseless treachery, which all its poetical excitability does but exasperate into the perpetration of more and more extravagant enormities.

"How finely is the progressive development of

such a character set before us in the course of the following act, in all that relates to the assassination of Banquo:

mark the intense selfishness implied in the following reflections:

"He chid the sisters,

When first they put the name of king upon me,
And bade them speak to him; then, prophet-like,
They hailed him father to a line of kings:
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,

Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If it be so,

For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind;

For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered;

Put rancours in the vessel of my peace
Only for them; and mine eternal jewel

Given to the common enemy of man,

To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!
Rather than so, come, fate, into the list,

And champion me to the utterance !"

"What a depth, we say, of the blackest selfishness is here disclosed! It is not enough for Macbeth