s
A modern ecstasy: the dead man's knell
Is there scarce ask'd for whom; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or e'er they sicken.

_Macd_. O, relation
Too nice, and yet too true!"

Here Ross's picked and precise wording of the matter shows his speech
to be the result of meditated preparation; for he has come with his
mind so full of what he was to say, that he could think of nothing
else; and Macduff, with characteristic plainness of ear and tongue,
finds it "too nice." His comment, at once so spontaneous and so apt,
is a delightful touch of the Poet's art; and tells us that
Shakespeare's judgment as well as his genius was at home in the secret
of a perfect style; and that he understood, no man better, the
essential poverty of "fine writing."

Equally apt and characteristic is another speech of Macduff's later in
the same scene, after learning how "all his pretty chickens and their
dam" have been put to death by the tyrant:

"Gentle Heaven,
Cut short all intermission; front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself;
Within my sword's length set him; if he 'scape,
Heaven forgive him too."

Macduff is a man of great simplicity, energy, and determination of
character; and here we have all these qualities boiled down to the
highest intensity, as would naturally be the effect of such news on
such a man. And observe how much is implied in that little word
_too_,--"Heaven forgive him too." As much as to say, "Let me once but
have a chance at him, if I don't kill him, then I'm as great a sinner
as he, and so God forgive us both!" I hardly know of another instance
of so great a volume of meaning compressed into so few words. And how
like it is to noble Macduff!

I could fill many pages with examples of this perfect suiting of the
style to the mental states of the dramatic speakers, but must rest
with citing a few more.

Hotspur is proverbially a man of impatient, irascible, headstrong
temper. See now how all this is reflected in the very step of his
language, when he has just been chafed into a rage by what the King
has said to him about the Scottish prisoners:

"Why, look you, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods,
Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear
Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.
In Richard's time,--what do you call the place?--
A plague upon 't!--it