of the infernal rites would be very striking, if the scene was not made ludicrous by a mob of old women, which the players have added to the three weird fifters.The incantation is fo confonant to the doctrine of enchantments, and receives fuch power by the help of those potent ministers of direful fuperftition, the terrible and the mysterious, that it has not the air of poetical fiction so much as of a discovery of magical fecrets; and thus it feizes the heart of the ignorant, and communicates an irrefiftible horror to the imagination of even the more informed fpectator.

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Shakespear was too well read in human nature, not to know, that, though reafon may expel the fuperftitions of the nursery, the imagination does not fo entirely free itself from their dominion, as not to re-admit them, if occafion prefents them, in the very shape in which they were once revered. The first scene in which the witches appear, is not fo happily executed as the others. He has too exactly followed the vulgar reports

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reports of the Lapland witches, of whom our failors ufed to imagine they could pur chafe a fair wind.

The choice of a ftory, that at once corroborated King James's doctrine of dæmonology, and fhewed the long destination of his family to the throne of Great Britain, was not lefs polite flattery to his majesty, than Virgil ufes to Auguftus and the Roman people, in making Anchifes fhew to Eneas the representations of unborn heroes, that were to adorn his line, and augment the glory of their common-wealth. It is reported, that a great French wit often laughs at the tragedy of Macbeth for having a legion of ghofts in it. One fhould imagine he either had not learnt English, or had forgot his Latin; for the fpirits of Banquo's line are no more ghosts than the reprefentations of the Julian race in the Æneid; and there is no ghost but Banquo's in the whole play. Euripides, in the most philofophic and polite age of the Athenians, brings the fhade of Polydorus,

Priam's

Priam's fon, upon the ftage, to tell a very long and lamentable tale. Here is therefore produced, by each tragedian, the departed fpirit walking this upper world for caufes admitted by popular faith, Among the ancients, the unburied, and with us the murdered, were fuppofed to do fo. The apparitions are therefore equally justifiable or blamable; fo the laurel crown must be adjudged to the poet who throws most of the fublime and the marvellous into the fupernatural agent; beft preferves the credibility. of its intervention, and renders it most useful in the drama. There furely can be no difpute of the fuperiority of our countryman in these articles. There are many bombast fpeeches in the tragedy of Macbeth; and these are the lawful prize of the critic: but envy, not content to nibble at faults, ftrikes at its true object, the prime excellencies and perfections of the thing it would depreciate. One should not wonder if a school-boy eritic, who neither knows what were the fuperftitions of former times, or the poet's privileges in all times, fhould flourish away, with

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with all the rash dexterity of wit, upon the appearance of a ghoft; but it is ftrange a man of universal learning, a real and just connoiffeur, and a true genius, fhould cite, as improper and abfurd, what has been practised by the most celebrated artists in the dramatic way, when fuch machinery was authorised by the belief of the people. Is there not reason to suspect from such uncandid treatment of our poet by this critic, that he

Views him with jealous, yet with fcornful eyes,
And hates for arts that caus'd himself to rife?.

The difference between a mind naturally prone to evil, and a frail one warped by force of temptations, is delicately distinguished in Macbeth and his wife. There are also some touches of the pencil that mark the male and female character. When they deliberate on the murder of the king, the duties of hoft and fubject ftrongly plead with him against the deed. She paffes over thefe confiderations ; goes to Duncan's chamber refolved to kill him, but could not

do

do it, because, fhe fays, he resembled her father while he flept. There is fomething feminine in this, and perfectly agreeable to the nature of the fex; who, even when void of principle, are seldom entirely divested of fentiment; and thus the poet, who, to use his own phrase, had overftepped the modesty of nature in the exaggerated fierceness of her character, returns back to the line and limits of humanity, and that very judiciously, by a fudden impreffion, which has only an inftantaneous effect. Thus the may relapse into her former wickedness, and, from the fame fufceptibility, by the force of other impreffions, be afterwards driven to diftraction. As her character was not composed of thofe gentle elements out of which regular repentance could be formed, it was well judged to throw her mind into the chaos of madness; and, as she had exhibited wickednefs in its highest degree of ferocity and atrociousness, fhe fhould be an example of the wildest agonies of remorfe. As Shakefpear could moft exactly delineate the human