"Theory, God bless you, I have none to give, sir." Warlike valour, as you said, is marked first and last--at the opening, and at the end. Surely a good and great quality, at least for poetical purposes. High general reputation won and held. The opinion of the wounded soldier was that of the whole army; and when he himself says, "I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss, not thrown aside so soon," I accept that he then truly describes his position in men's minds. NORTH. All true. But we soon gain, too, this insight into his constitution, that the pillar upon which he has built up life is Reputation, and not Respect of Law--not Self-Respect; that the point which Shakspeare above all others intends in him, is that his is a spirit not self-stayed--leaning upon outward stays--and therefore-- BULLER. Liable to all-- NORTH. Don't take the words out of my mouth, sir; or rather, don't put them into my mouth, sir. BULLER. Touchy to-day. NORTH. The strongest expression of this character is his throwing himself upon the illicit divinings of futurity, upon counsellors known for infernal; and you see what subjugating sway the Three Spirits take at once over him. On the contrary, the Thaness is self-stayed; and this difference grounds the poetical opposition of the two personages. In Macbeth, I suppose a certain splendour of character--magnificence of action high--a certain impure generosity--mixed up of some kindliness and sympathy, and of the pleasure from self-elation and self-expansion in a victorious career, and of that ambition which feeds on public esteem. BULLER. Ay--just so, sir. NORTH. Now mark, Buller--this is a character which, if the path of duty and the path of personal ambition were laid out by the Sisters to be one and the same path, might walk through life in sunlight and honour, and invest the tomb with proud and revered trophies. To show such a spirit wrecked and hurled into infamy--the ill-woven sails rent into shreds by the whirlwind--is a lesson worthy the Play and the Poet--and such a lesson as I think Shakspeare likely to have designed--or, without preaching about lessons, such an ethical revelation as I think likely to have caught hold upon Shakspeare's intelligence. It would seem to me a dramatically-poetical subject. The mightiest of temptations occurs to a mind, full of powers, endowed with available moral elements, but without set virtue--without principles--"and down goes all before it." If the essential delineation of Macbeth be this conflict of Moral elements--of good and evil--of light and darkness--I see a very poetical conception; if merely a hardened and bloody hypocrite from the beginning, I see none. But I need not say to you, gentlemen, that all this is as far as may be from the exaggerated panegyric on his character by Payne Knight. TALBOYS.