have been the state of inactivity into which she fell when her husband broke away from her support into that bloody, bold, and resolute career which followed the murder of Banquo. We can only speculate upon her course of conduct from this time. She probably in some manner gave her countenance to her husband's career, or she would scarcely have been called his “fiend-like queen ;” for it must be remembered, that, although the reader is well aware of her guilt, no suspicion of her participation in Duncan's murder has been excited in the other personages of the drama. We may suppose, then, that without active participation in that career of tyranny which desolated Scotland, she looked on with frigid and cruel indif
ference, while, her imagination having no power to throw itself outwardly, it became the prey of one engrossing emotion— that of remorse.
Giving no outward expression of it in word
or deed, she verified the saying of Malcolm : “The grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break.” Cold, stedfast, and self-contained, she could no more escape from the gnawing tooth of remorse, than Prometheus, chained
upon his rock, could escape from the vulture-talons for ever tearing his vitals. In Macbeth's more demonstrative and flexible
nature, passion was explosive; in her’s it was consuming.
In
him the inward fires found a volcanic vent; in her their
pent-up force shook in earthquake the deep foundations of the soul.
Lady Macbeth's end is psychologically even more instructive than that of her husband.
The manner in which even-handed
justice deals with her, “his fiend-like wife,” is an exquisite masterpiece of dramatic skill.
The undaunted metal which
would have compelled her to resist to the last, if brought face
to face with any resistible adversaries, gradually gives way to the feeling of remorse and deep melancholy, when left to feed upon itself. The moral object of the drama required that the
