“You are, and do not know’t: 
    The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood
    Is stopp’d; the very source of it is stopp’d.”

Of course he words the matter so finely all because he is playing the hypocrite.  Compare with this the quick honest way in which Macduff dashes out the truth:  “Your royal father’s murder’d.”  We have a still more emphatic instance of the same kind in Goneril and Regan’s hollow-hearted, and therefore highly rhetorical professions of love, when the doting old King invites his three daughters to an auction of falsehood, by proposing,

    “That we our largest bounty may extend
    Where nature doth with merit challenge.”

So, again in Hamlet, i. 2, the King opens with an elaborate strain of phrase-making, full of studied and ingenious antitheses; and he keeps up that style so long as he is using language to conceal his thoughts; but afterwards, in the same speech, on coming to matters of business, he falls at once into the direct, simple style of plain truth and intellectual manhood.

But we have a more curious illustration, though in quite another kind, in Macbeth, iv. 3, where Ross, fresh from Scotland, comes to Macduff in England: 

    “Macd.  Stands Scotland where it did?

Ross.  Alas, poor country, Almost afraid to know itself! it cannot Be call’d our mother, but our grave:  where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air, Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy:  the dead man’s knell Is there scarce ask’d for whom; and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying or e’er they sicken.

    Macd.  O, relation
    Too nice, and yet too true!”

Here Ross’s picked and precise wording of the matter shows his speech to be the result of meditated preparation; for he has come with his mind so full of what he was to say, that he could think of nothing else; and Macduff, with characteristic plainness of ear and tongue, finds it “too nice.”  His comment, at once so spontaneous and so apt, is a delightful touch of the Poet’s art; and tells us that Shakespeare’s judgment as well as his genius was at home in the secret of a perfect style; and that he understood, no man better, the essential poverty of “fine writing.”

Equally apt and characteristic is another speech of Macduff’s later in the same scene, after learning how “all his pretty chickens and their dam” have been put to death by the tyrant: 

                              “Gentle Heaven,
    Cut short all intermission; front to front
    Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself;
    Within my sword’s length set him; if he ’scape,
    Heaven forgive him too.”