suades one unequivocally that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the most enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that guilt could use. It is only in soliloquy that she invokes the powers of hell to unsex her. To her husband she avows, and the naturalness of her language makes us believe her, that she had felt the instinct of filial as well as maternal love. But she makes her very virtues the means of a taunt to her lord: 'You have the milk of human kindness in your heart,' she says (in substance) to him, 'but ambition, which is my ruling passion, would be also yours if you had courage. With a hankering desire to suppress, if you could, all your weaknesses of sympathy, you are too cowardly to will the deed, and can only dare to wish it. You speak of sympathies and feelings. I, too, have felt with a tenderness which your sex cannot know; but I am resolute in my ambition to trample on all that obstructs my way to a crown. Look to me, and be ashamed of your weakness."
"In the tremendous suspense of these moments" (when Duncan sleeps), Mrs. Siddons again tells us, "while she recollects her habitual humanity, one trait of tender feelings is expressed: 'Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.'"
Through many pages Mrs. Siddons thus gives us her views of the character of Lady Macbeth; sometimes verging on a pomposity that is almost Johnsonese. Her later criticisms of the parts in which she acted, bear out the statement that hers was not an intellectual power that strengthened or expanded after the "middle of the road of life." This year, 1785, saw
