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though he is able, when occasion requires, to stifle and subdue it."

On this narrow ground Mr Kemble enters the list with Mr Whately, and his second, Mr Steevens, and provided with a great number of quotations from the tragedy, traces the character of its hero from its opening to its close, as one of determined courage and intrepidity,—a courage not excited by exertion to any particular purpose, but native to the person, and an inherent quality in his mind. I think Mr Kemble has made out the point for which he contends; but I feel in the two characters compared, a distinction more marked, in my opinion, and more important, than that on which Mr Kemble has written, with considerable labour, no fewer than 170 pages.

That distinction seems to me to consist, not in any particular quality, such as that of personal courage, but in the original structure of mind of the two persons represented, distinguished by Shakspeare with his usual intimate knowledge of human nature. That knowledge, with which Shakspeare seems gifted in an almost miraculous degree, enables him, beyond any other dramatist, to individualize his characters. There is nothing general, nothing given in the abstract; every character is a portrait, with those marked and peculiar features by which we immediately recognize the individual. Macbeth and Richard are both ambitious; but their ambition is differently modified, by the different dispositions which the poet has shewn them originally to possess.—There is a process, a gradation, in the crimes and ambition of Macbeth; Richard is from the beginning a villain,—a hard remorseless villain,—with no restraint but his own interest or safety, acting from the impulse of his own dark mind alone, admitting no adviser from without, no conscience from within. Macbeth requires a prompter for his ambition, a more than accomplice in his crimes. That prompter and that accomplice Shakspeare has given him in his wife; and with his wonted depth of discernment of the peculiar attributes of our nature, he has given her that rapid unhesitating resolution in wickedness, which, in female wickedness, is the effect of the weakness, and the quickly as well as strongly excited feelings of the sex. In love, in hatred, in ambition, the overbearing passion of the moment quite unsexes them; the most timid become bold, the most gentle fierce, the most irresolute resolved. In the attainment of whatever favourite object, women are much less restrained than men, by reflections on the past, or calculations on the future. Lady Macbeth has none of those doubts or fears which come across the mind of her lord; she looks straight forward to the crown, and sees no bar, from humanity or conscience, in the way.

The developement of Macbeth's character is one of the finest things in that admirable drama. What has been criticised as a barbarous departure from dramatic rule in Shakspeare, in the construction of his plays, affords, in truth, the means of tracing the growth and progress of character, the current of the human mind, in which he excels all other dramatists, much more completely than an adherence to the unity of time could have allowed.—The bursts of passion may be shown in a moment; a story may be compressed, at least in its most interesting parts, into very small compass; but the growth, the gradual ripening of character, cannot be traced but in a considerable space of time. We must be led through many intermediate transactions, before such a character as that of Macbeth can be exhibited to us, changed, by steps so natural as to gain our fullest belief, from the brave and gallant soldier whom Duncan honours, into the bloody and relentless tyrant who wades through blood to the throne, and remains steeped in blood to maintain himself there, yet retains enough of its original tincture of virtue (or at least the sense of virtue) and humanity, as to interest us in his fall at the close of a life sullied by every crime, and which, but for the art of the poet, we should devote to pure unmitigated hatred. In truth, the same intimate knowledge of the human heart, that enabled him to unwind the maze of Macbeth's former conduct, guides the poet in that softening which he has given to his character in the closing scenes. During the bustle of the chase of ambition, such feelings have no room to unfold themselves; but if any pause occurs (such as here the death of the Queen) they re-assert the power which