g, rambling
novel of adventure by Sir Philip Sidney.

+Macbeth+.--Macbeth, one of the great Scottish nobles of early times,
is led, partly by his own ambition, partly by the instigation of evil
supernatural powers, to murder King Duncan and usurp his place on the
throne of Scotland. In this bloody task he is aided and encouraged by
his wife, a woman of powerful character, whose conscience is
temporarily smothered by her frantic desire to advance her husband's
career. We are forced to sympathize with this guilty pair, wicked as
they {188} are, because we are made to feel that they are not naturally
criminals, that they are swept into crime by the misdirection of
energies which, if directed along happier lines, might have been
praiseworthy. Macbeth, vigorous and imaginative, has a poet's or
conqueror's yearning toward a larger fullness of life, experience, joy.
It is the woeful misdirection of this splendid energy through unlawful
channels which makes him a murderer, not the callous, animal
indifference of the born criminal. Similarly, his wife is a woman of
great executive ability, reaching out instinctively for a field large
enough in which to make that ability gain its maximum of
accomplishment. Nature meant her for a queen; and it is the
instinctive effort to find her natural sphere of action,--an effort
common to all humanity--which blinds her conscience at the fatal
moment. Once entered on their career of evil, they find no chance for
turning back. Suspicions are aroused, and Macbeth feels himself forced
to guard himself from the effects of the first. The ghosts of his
victims haunt his guilty conscience; his wife dies heart-broken with
remorse which comes too late; and he himself is killed in battle by his
own rebellious countrymen.

Between the characters of Macbeth and his wife the dramatist has drawn
a subtle but vital distinction. Macbeth is an unprincipled but
imaginative man, with a strong tincture of reverence and awe. Hitherto
he has been restrained in the straight path of an upright life by his
respect for conventions. When once that barrier is broken down, he has
no purely moral check in his own nature to replace it, and rushes like
a flood, with ever growing impetus, from, crime to crime. His {189}
wife, on the other hand, has a conscience; and conscience, unlike awe
for conventions, can be temporarily suppressed, but not destroyed. It
reawakes when the first great crime is over, drives