CONTENTS. Observations on Mrs. Siddons's Estimate of Lady Macbeth's Character, and on that given by Mrs. Jameson, in her "Characteristics of Women." CHAPTER II. THOSE Who have read Mrs. Jameson's admirable "Characteristics of Women," must have remarked the general similarity of her opinions respecting Lady Macbeth's character, to those delivered by Mrs. Siddons, in the foregoing critique. If there be any difference, it is that the former goes a shade farther than Mrs. Siddons, in her advocacy of Shakespeare's heroine. Whether Mrs. Jameson heard of Mrs. Siddons's ideas on the subject, which she might by possibility, as the great actress made no secret of them, I have never been in the least anxious to ascertain, because it is plain, from her writings, that Mrs. Jameson has a mind too original, to require or to borrow suggestions from any one. But, in deprecating all suspicion of obligation on the one side, I have an equal right to exclude the possibility of its being suspected on the other. Mrs. Siddons shewed me these Remarks on the character of Lady Macbeth some nineteen years ago, so that there can be little doubt of their having been earlier written than those of the authoress of "The Characteristics." In a general view, I agree with both of the fair advocates of Lady Macbeth, that the language of preceding critics was rather unmeasured, when they described her as "thoroughly hateful, invariably savage, and purely demoniac. It is true, that the ungentlemanly epithet, fiendlike, is applied to her by Shakespeare himself, but then he puts it into the mouth of King Malcolm, who might naturally be incensed. Lady Macbeth is not thoroughly hateful, for she is not a virago, not an adultress, not impelled by revenge. On the contrary, she expresses no feeling of personal malignity towards any human being in the whole course of her part. Shakespeare could have easily displayed her crimes in a more commonplace and accountable light, by assigning some feudal grudge as a mixed motive of her cruelty to Duncan; but he makes her a murderess in cold blood, and from the sole motive of ambition, well knowing, that if he had broken up the inhuman serenity of her remorselessness by the ruffling of anger, he would have vulgarized the features of the splendid Titaness. By this entire absence of petty vice and personal virulence, and by concentrating all the springs of her conduct into the one determined feeling of ambition, the mighty poet has given her character a statue-like simplicity, which, though cold, is spirit-stirring, from the wonder |