, and yet to the
public, and doubtless to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,--that the
proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions
is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius,
meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just
that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to
realise its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and
hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case
in every poet and original philosopher:--but hope fully gratified, and yet
the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear; and, indeed,
the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own
consciousness, how large a share chance had in his successes, may very
naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will
depend on his own act and election.

The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare's, as his Ariel
and Caliban,--fates, furies, and materialising witches being the elements.
They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the
contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance
to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience.
Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good;
they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature,
the lawless of human nature,--elemental avengers without sex or kin:--

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air."

How much it were to be wished in playing _Macbeth_, that an attempt should
be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient
pantomime;--that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and
making sensuously perceptible that of Shakespeare!

The style and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should
be illustrated by reference to the interlude in _Hamlet_, in which the
epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as
the real-life diction. In _Macbeth_ the poet's object was to raise the
mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for
the precipitate consummation of guilt in the early part of the play. The
true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the
key-note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their
re-appearance in the third scene, afte