courage which comes of strong and copious circulation.  The moral smallness of the man is insisted on from the first, in the shudder of uncontrollable jealousy with which he sees Duncan embracing Banquo.  He may have some northern poetry of speech, but he has not much logical understanding.  In his dealings with the supernatural powers he is like a savage with his fetich, trusting them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever he is crossed, casting his belief aside and calling ‘fate into the list.’  For his wife, he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew for her fiery spirit to command.  The nature of his feeling towards her is rendered with a most precise and delicate touch.  He always yields to the woman’s fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know how much meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly hard and unloving.  Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might take hold of any one who happened to be nearest to him at a moment of excitement.  Love has fallen out of this marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship.  Only once—­at the very moment when she is showing herself so little a woman and so much a high-spirited man—­only once is he very deeply stirred towards her; and that finds expression in the strange and horrible transport of admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini’s lips—­’Bring forth men-children only!’

The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.  Macbeth’s voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to be forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman’s hands he seemed to have blood in his utterance.  Never for a moment, even in the very article of the murder, does he possess his own soul.  He is a man on wires.  From first to last it is an exhibition of hideous cowardice.  For, after all, it is not here, but in broad daylight, with the exhilaration of conflict, where he can assure himself at every blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand, that this man’s physical bravery can keep him up; he is an unwieldy ship, and needs plenty of way on before he will steer.

In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of what he has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the ‘twenty trenched gashes’ on Banquo’s head.  Thus Macbeth makes welcome to his imagination those very details of physical horror which are so soon to turn sour in him.  As he runs out to embrace these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to realise to his mind’s eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he is dressing out the phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination, playing the part of justice, is to ’commend to his own lips the ingredients of his poisoned chalice.’  With the recollection of Hamlet and his father’s spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy, it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two apparitions