ress, but the
incarnation of ideas: he does not robe his thoughts with garments
externally cut and fitted to them, but his thoughts robe themselves in
a living texture of flesh and blood.

* * * * *

Hence the wonderful correspondence, so often remarked, between the
Poet's style and the peculiar moods, tempers, motives, and habits of
his characters, as if the language had caught the very grain and
tincture of their minds. So, for instance, we find him rightly making
the most glib-tongued rhetoric proceed from utter falseness of heart;
for men never speak so well, in the elocutionary sense, as when they
are lying; while, on the other hand, "there are no tricks in plain and
simple faith." Thus, in _Macbeth_, when the murder of Duncan is first
announced, we have the hero speaking of it to the Princes, when one of
them asks, "What is amiss?"

"You are, and do not know't:
The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood
Is stopp'd; the very source of it is stopp'd."

Of course he words the matter so finely all because he is playing the
hypocrite. Compare with this the quick honest way in which Macduff
dashes out the truth: "Your royal father's murder'd." We have a still
more emphatic instance of the same kind in Goneril and Regan's
hollow-hearted, and therefore highly rhetorical professions of love,
when the doting old King invites his three daughters to an auction of
falsehood, by proposing,

"That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge."

So, again in _Hamlet_, i. 2, the King opens with an elaborate strain
of phrase-making, full of studied and ingenious antitheses; and he
keeps up that style so long as he is using language to conceal his
thoughts; but afterwards, in the same speech, on coming to matters of
business, he falls at once into the direct, simple style of plain
truth and intellectual manhood.

But we have a more curious illustration, though in quite another kind,
in _Macbeth_, iv. 3, where Ross, fresh from Scotland, comes to Macduff
in England:

"_Macd_. Stands Scotland where it did?

_Ross_. Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself! it cannot
Be call'd our mother, but our grave: where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air,
Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seem