and the two men haunted.  But there are none to be found.  Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo’s spirit and the ‘twenty trenched gashes.’  He is afraid of he knows not what.  He is abject, and again blustering.  In the end he so far forgets himself, his terror, and the nature of what is before him, that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man.  When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is something really childish in the way he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an expression of almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go to bed.  And what is the upshot of the visitation?  It is written in Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of Salvini’s voice and expression:- ‘O! siam nell’ opra ancor fanciulli’—­ ’We are yet but young in deed.’  Circle below circle.  He is looking with horrible satisfaction into the mouth of hell.  There may still be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he may move untroubled in this element of blood.

In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is Salvini’s finest moment throughout the play.  From the first he was admirably made up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked Othello.  From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can see this character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase; for the man before you is a type you know well already.  He arrives with Banquo on the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of gesture, full of pride and the sense of animal wellbeing, and satisfied after the battle like a beast who has eaten his fill.  But in the fifth act there is a change.  This is still the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is still the same face which in the earlier acts could be superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.  But now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features.  He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full of horrors.  Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her hand:  Macbeth makes no complaint—­he has ceased to notice it now; but the same smell is in his nostrils.  A contained fury and disgust possesses him.  He taunts the messenger and the doctor as people would taunt their mortal enemies.  And, indeed, as he knows right well, every one is his enemy now, except his wife.  About her he questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety; and, in tones of grisly mystery, asks him if he can ’minister to a mind diseased.’  When the news of her death is brought him, he is staggered and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief that he displays.  There had been two of them against God and man; and now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he had expected.  And so her death is not only an affliction, but one more disillusion;