are lads, not
children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the more so
because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and
can never be thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the
first creation in which Shakespeare's power of pathos showed itself
mature;[245] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves
that it never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures,
too,--affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, 'of an open and free
nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled
acuteness and _naivete_, charming in their confidence in themselves and
the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity
of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great
warriors, or profound politicians.

Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in
the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius'
never-finished 'Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or
the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the
butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment
of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the
statement,

'A shall not tread on me:
I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.

Still one does not easily forget little Macduff's delightful and
well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in
argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the
murderer call his father by the same name,--

Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.

Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last
words to his mother would have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'

I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things
in which _Macbeth_ reminds us of _Richard III._ And he is perhaps the
only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say 'perhaps,' for
though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his
patient's husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.

5

The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is
grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as
ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared wit