Is loathsome in his own deliciousness

And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore, love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Yet the catastrophe is not due solely to the defects of the hero: there is always a conspiring cause outside. For it is the nature of temptation that, when there is a defect within, it is made to quicken and grow by influences from without, and sin is always a birth from the union of inclination and opportunity. Evil is embodied not only in the individual heart, but in everyone's environment; and external influences may bring guilt so near that it is almost inevitable-never, however, quite inevitable; for it always requires the cooperation of our own evil will to bring the act to birth. The tempter may be a man or a woman. In Macbeth

Or temp

it is Lady Macbeth, in Othello it is lago. tation may arise from something more remote and general. Thus, in Romeo and Juliet the co-operating evil is found in the feuds of the rival houses and the feebleness of the sovereign power, which has allowed these to go on unchecked. Thus the Prince says, in the final scene :

Capulet, Montague,

See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

That Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love; And I, for winking at your discords, too,

Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.

But there may be a cause of the catastrophe even more remote. This is made manifest especially in Macbeth, where, behind Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, there is the sinister influence of the Witches, who stir up the latent ambition in the hero's mind and suggest to him the crime which proves his ruin. These mysterious beings belong to a world of evil, lying outside the circle of humanity, in which, under one form or another, mankind has always believed; and there can be no doubt that such beliefs are due to a feeling that in misfortune there is an element not wholly accounted for either by the faults of the sufferers or by the wills of their human tempters. It is as if there were invisible wills, mixing unaccountable drops in the cup of man's destiny, as the Witches mingle the queer ingredients in their pot:

Fillet of a fenny snake

In the caldron boil and bake,
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing—
For a charm of powerful trouble

Let the hell-broth boil and bubble.

Here the Shakspearean drama approaches to that of the Greeks, in which the catastrophe is generally due not to the fault of the hero or even to temptation proceeding from those around him, but to fate, to the

envy of the gods at the excess of human happiness, or to the nemesis of some unexpiated crime, which has come down as an heirloom to the hero without his having participated in its commission or even perhaps being aware of its existence. The greater wholesomeness of the moral taught by the modern poet is unquestionable, when he holds men and women to be responsible for their own misfortunes, because they bring them on themselves either through defects in their own character or by yielding to temptation. This is his usual procedure, though occasionally he plays with other influences to which human beings have ascribed their calamities, such as those of the heavenly bodies. In King Lear he makes one of his characters say: "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and traitors by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on".

The central interest of these Tragedies, then, is to show how the defect in a noble character, partly by the force of its own inherent tendency and partly by the force of circumstances, grows and grows, till it becomes predominant, placing the hero at variance with

the moral order of the world, which, however, cannot be turned aside but, sweeping on to its inevitable goal, crushes all who have attempted to impede its course. It has been pointed out that, in this series of dramas, Shakspeare has exhibited this course of events as taking place in different sections of human life: in Romeo and Juliet the happiness ruined is that of betrothed lovers, and the canker is precipitancy; in Othello the ruined happiness is that of a married couple, and it is destroyed by jealousy; in King Lear the relationship is that of father and children, and the canker at the root is overfondness; in Macbeth we enter the wider society of the state, which is overthrown by ambition; and in Hamlet the problem is the most complex of all, as the play deals with nearly all the social relationships.

As I have already hinted, Macbeth is the purest and most rapid of all these Tragedies, and in it, accordingly, we see the elements of tragedy in their simplest form. At the outset, the hero is seen returning from successful war, which he has been waging in the service of King Duncan, who is well aware of his merits and forward to reward them. In the company of Banquo he is crossing an open heath, when they come upon the Witches, engaged in their incantations, who announce to Macbeth that he is to become Thane of Glamis and Thane of Cawdor and King of Scots,

and to Banquo, that he is to be the ancestor of a line of kings. On Banquo this announcement makes no impression, as he "neither begs nor fears their favour nor their hate," but it takes instant effect on Macbeth, a clear sign that it has appealed to something in his breast, where the seed of treachery to his king must have been already sown. When, immediately afterwards, he finds himself actually created Thane of Cawdor and Thane of Glamis, he is worked up to the highest excitement by the certainty thus afforded that the rest of the prediction will likewise be fulfilled. this mood he returns home; but meantime he has apprised Lady Macbeth by letter of the Witches' prophecy and its partial fulfilment; and she is far more completely carried away with the dream of ambition than he, and thus is prepared to screw his courage to the sticking place. For she is afraid that his ambition is not equal to the task of climbing the ladder of crime, which she sees to be the path to the throne. Thus she apostrophizes him in his absence:

Glamis thou art and Cawdor, and shalt be

In

What thou art promised; yet do I fear thy nature : It is too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way.

Thou would'st be great,

Art not without ambition; but without

The illness should attend it. What thou would'st

highly

That would'st thou holily;