Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
     Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
     Without leave-taking?

It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without going into the considerations on each side, I may express the opinion that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he fled without leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way.  Perhaps he said to himself, with Coriolanus,

     Not of a woman’s tenderness to be,
     Requires nor child nor woman’s face to see.

Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare’s boys (there are scarcely any little girls).  It is somewhat curious that nearly all of them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas.  I remember but two exceptions:  little William Page, who said his Hic, haec, hoc to Sir Hugh Evans; and the page before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be feared that even this page, if he is the Boy of Henry V., came to an ill end, being killed with the luggage.

     So wise so young, they say, do ne’er live long,

as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales.  Of too many of these children (some of the ‘boys,’ e.g. those in Cymbeline, are lads, not children) the saying comes true.  They are pathetic figures, the more so because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and can never be thought of apart from them.  Perhaps Arthur is even the first creation in which Shakespeare’s power of pathos showed itself mature;[245] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves that it never decayed.  They are almost all of them noble figures, too,—­affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, ’of an open and free nature’ like Shakespeare’s best men.  And almost all of them, again, are amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled acuteness and naivete, charming in their confidence in themselves and the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great warriors, or profound politicians.

Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks.  There is nothing in the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius’ never-finished ‘Winter’s Tale’ of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the statement,

                           ’A shall not tread on me: 
     I’ll run away till I’m bigger, but then I’ll fight.

Still one does not easily forget little Macduff’s delightful and well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his father as a ‘traitor’; or his immediate response when he heard the murderer call his father by the same name,—­