Well then, now
     Have you consider’d of my speeches?  Know
     That it was he in the times past which held you
     So under fortune, which you thought had been
     Our innocent self:  this I made good to you
     In our last conference, pass’d in probation with you,
     How you were borne in hand, how cross’d, the instruments,
     Who wrought with them, and all things else that might
     To half a soul and to a notion crazed
     Say, ‘Thus did Banquo.’

This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth’s less poetic speeches, and leaves the same impression of burning energy, though not of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches.  In these we find either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative expressions (as in the famous lines about ’the innocent sleep’).  Our impressions as to the diction of the play are largely derived from these speeches of the hero, but not wholly so.  The writing almost throughout leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.]

[Footnote 222:  See his first words to the Ghost:  ’Thou canst not say I did it.’]

[Footnote 223: 

     For only in destroying I find ease
     To my relentless thoughts.—­Paradise Lost, ix. 129.

Milton’s portrait of Satan’s misery here, and at the beginning of Book IV., might well have been suggested by Macbeth.  Coleridge, after quoting Duncan’s speech, I. iv. 35 ff., says:  ’It is a fancy; but I can never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth, without involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan.’  I doubt if it was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton thought at one time of writing a tragedy on Macbeth.)]

[Footnote 224:  The immediate reference in ‘But no more sights’ is doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the ‘blood-bolter’d Banquo,’ recalls to him the vision of the preceding night, of which he had said,

                        You make me strange
     Even to the disposition that I owe,
     When now I think you can behold such sights,
     And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
     When mine is blanch’d with fear.]

[Footnote 225:  ‘Luxurious’ and ‘luxury’ are used by Shakespeare only in this older sense.  It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true throughout.]

[Footnote 226:  I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife remains what it was when he greeted her with the words ’My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.’  He has greatly changed; she has ceased to help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety in the questions he puts to the doctor about her.  But his love for her was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind us of Macbeth’s: