Thus the scene in which Orestes stabs his mother
within her chamber, and she is heard pleading for mercy, while Electra
stands forward listening exultingly to her mother's cries, and urging
her brother to strike again, "another blow! another!" &c. is terribly
fine, but the horror is too shocking, too _physical_--if I may use such
an expression: it will not surely bear a comparison with the murdering
scene in Macbeth, where the exhibition of various passions--the
irresolution of Macbeth, the bold determination of his wife, the deep
suspense, the rage of the elements without, the horrid stillness within,
and the secret feeling of that infernal agency which is ever present to
the fancy, even when not visible on the scene--throw a rich coloring of
poetry over the whole, which does not take from "the present horror of
the time," and yet relieves it. Shakspeare's blackest shadows are like
those of Rembrandt; so intense, that the gloom which brooded over Egypt
in her day of wrath was pale in comparison--yet so transparent that we
seem to see the light of heaven through their depth.

In the whole compass of dramatic poetry, there is but one female
character which can be placed near that of Lady Macbeth; the MEDEA. Not
the vulgar, voluble fury of the Latin tragedy,[121] nor the Medea in a
hoop petticoat of Corneille, but the genuine Greek Medea,--the Medea of
Euripides.[122]

There is something in the _Medea_ which seizes irresistibly on the
imagination. Her passionate devotion to Jason, for whom she had left her
parents and country--to whom she had given all, and

Would have drawn the spirit from her breast
Had he but asked it, sighing forth her soul
Into his bosom;[123]

the wrongs and insults which drive her to desperation--the horrid
refinement of cruelty with which she plans and executes her revenge upon
her faithless husband--the gush of fondness with which she weeps over
her children, whom in the next moment she devotes to destruction in a
paroxysm of insane fury, carry the terror and pathos of tragic situation
to their extreme height. But if we may be allowed to judge through the
medium of a translation, there is a certain hardness in the manner of
treating the character, which in some degree defeats the effect. Medea
talks too much: her human feelings and superhuman power are not
sufficiently blended. Taking into consideration the different impulses
which actuate Medea and Lady Macbeth, as love, jealousy