, the contact, if he choose to touch it, is more likely to
drag him down, down, to the place where it lies itself.

But, Sir, the honorable member was not, for other reasons, entirely
happy in his allusion to the story of Banquo's murder and Banquo's
ghost. It was not, I think, the friends, but the enemies of the murdered
Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not _down_. The honorable
gentleman is fresh in his reading of the English classics, and can put
me right if I am wrong: but, according to my poor recollection, it was
at those who had begun with caresses and ended with foul and treacherous
murder that the gory locks were shaken. The ghost of Banquo, like that
of Hamlet, was an honest ghost. It disturbed no innocent man. It knew
where its appearance would strike terror, and who would cry out, A
ghost! It made itself visible in the right quarter, and compelled the
guilty and the conscience-smitten, and none others, to start, with,

"Pr'ythee, see there! behold!--look! lo,
If I stand here, I saw him!"

THEIR eyeballs were seared (was it not so, Sir?) who had thought to
shield themselves by concealing their own hand, and laying the
imputation of the crime on a low and hireling agency in wickedness; who
had vainly attempted to stifle the workings of their own coward
consciences by ejaculating through white lips and chattering teeth,
"Thou canst not say I did it!" I have misread the great poet if those
who had no way partaken in the deed of the death, either found that they
were, or _feared that they should be_, pushed from their stools by the
ghost of the slain, or exclaimed to a spectre created by their own fears
and their own remorse, "Avaunt! and quit our sight!"

There is another particular, Sir, in which the honorable member's quick
perception of resemblances might, I should think, have seen something in
the story of Banquo, making it not altogether a subject of the most
pleasant contemplation. Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by
it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment, rather, and
sore mortification,--dust and ashes, the common fate of vaulting
ambition overleaping itself? Did not even-handed justice erelong commend
the poisoned chalice to their own lips? Did they not soon find that for
another they had "filed their mind"? that their ambition, though
apparently for the moment successful, had but put a barren sceptre in
their grasp? Ay, Sir,

"a barren