such a spectacle, is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man, if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goingson of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart, was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is 'unsexed; ' Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated - cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs

locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested - laid asleep — tranced — racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds; the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the reestablishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert, but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!

NOTES.

NOTE 1. Page 2.

"The whole people were still draped professionally.”— For example, physicians never appeared without the insignia of their calling; clergymen would have incurred the worst suspicions had they gone into the streets without a gown and bands. Ladies, again, universally wore masks, as the sole substitute known to our ancestors for the modern parasol; a fact, perhaps, not generally known.

NOTE 2. Page 17.

The five acts which old tradition prescribed as binding upon the Greek tragic drama cannot always be marked off by the interruptions of the chorus. In the Heracleide of Euripides they can. But it is evident that these acts existed for the sake of the chorus, by way of allowing sufficient openings (both as to number and length) for the choral dances; and the necessity must have grown out of the time allowed for a dramatic representation, and originally, therefore, out of the mere accidental convenience prescribed by the social usages of Athens. The rule, therefore, was at any rate an arbitrary rule. Purely conventional it would have been, and local, had it even grown out of any Attic superstition (as we have sometimes thought it might) as to the number of the choral dances. But most probably it rested upon a sort of convention, which of all is the least entitled to respect or translation to foreign

soils, namely, the mere local arrangement of meals and sleeping hours in Athens; which, having prescribed a limited space to the whole performance, afterwards left this space to be distributed between the recitation and the more popular parts, addressed to eye and ear as the mob of Athens should insist. Horace, in saying roundly, as a sort of brutum fulmen, “Non quinto brevior, non sit productior, actu fabulæ," delivers this capricious rule in the capricious manner which becomes it. The stet pro ratione voluntas comes forward equally in the substance of the precept and the style of its delivery.

NOTE 3. Page 21.

Valckenaer, in his immortal series of comments on the Phonissa of Euripides, notices the peculiar spirit and tendency of the innovations introduced into the tragic diction by this youngest of the great Athenian dramatists. These innovations ran in the very same direction as those of Wordsworth in our own times; to say this, however, without further explanation, considering how profoundly the views of Wordsworth in this matter have been misunderstood, would simply be-to mislead the English reader equally as to Euripides. Yet, as we should be sorry to discuss so great a theme indirectly and in a corner, it may be enough for the present to remark - that Euripides did not mean to tax his great predecessors Eschylus and Sophocles with any error of taste in the cast of their diction. Having their purposes, they chose wisely. But he felt that the Athenian tragedy had two functions 1, to impress awe, and religious terror; 2, to impress pity. This last he adopted as his own peculiar function; and with it a corresponding diction-less grand (it is true) and stately, but counterbalancing this loss by a far greater power of pure (sometimes we may say, of holy) household pathos. Such also was the change wrought by Wordsworth.

NOTE 4. Page 22.

Any man, who has at all studied the Greek iambics, must well remember those forms of the metre which are used in a cadence at the close of a resounding passage, meant to express a full pause, and the prodigious difference from such as were meant for weaker lines, or less impressive metrical effects. These cadences, with their full body of rhythmus, are never reproduced in the Latin imitations of the iambic hexameter: nor does it seem within the compass of