uliarly favorable to the
development and delineation of the human form, and have handed down to
us the purest models of strength and grace--so the times in which
Shakspeare lived were favorable to the vigorous delineation of natural
character. Society was not then one vast conventional masquerade of
manners. In his revelations, the accidental circumstances are to the
individual character, what the drapery of the antique statue is to the
statue itself; it is evident, that, though adapted to each other, and
studied relatively, they were also studied separately. We trace through
the folds the fine and true proportions of the figure beneath: they seem
and are independent of each other to the practised eye, though carved
together from the same enduring substance; at once perfectly distinct
and eternally inseparable. In history we can but study character in
relation to events, to situation and circumstances, which disguise and
encumber it: we are left to imagine, to infer, what certain people must
have been, from the manner in which they have acted or suffered.
Shakspeare and nature bring us back to the true order of things; and
showing us what the human being _is_, enable us to judge of the possible
as well as the positive result in acting and suffering. Here, instead of
judging the individual by his actions, we are enabled to judge of
actions by a reference to the individual. When we can carry this power
into the experience of real life, we shall perhaps be more just to one
another, and not consider ourselves aggrieved, because we cannot gather
figs from thistles and grapes from thorns.

In the play or poem of Macbeth, the interest of the story is so
engrossing, the events so rapid and so appalling, the accessories so
sublimely conceived and so skilfully combined, that it is difficult to
detach Lady Macbeth from the dramatic situation, or consider her apart
from the terrible associations of our first and earliest impressions. As
the vulgar idea of a Juliet--that all-beautiful and heaven-gifted child
of the south--is merely a love-sick girl in white satin, so the
common-place idea of Lady Macbeth, though endowed with the rarest
powers, the loftiest energies, and the profoundest affections, is
nothing but a fierce, cruel woman, brandishing a couple of daggers, and
inciting her husband to butcher a poor old king.

Even those who reflect more deeply are apt to consider rather the mode
in which a certain character is manifested