but, in a strange condition of superstitious fear and soldierly courage, he calls his men to arms, and goes out crying,— “Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back.” And this throughout is the character of Macbeth’s utterances. He is not like Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite; he is a poetical and sentimental hypocrite. His phrases and figures of speech have no root in his real life; they are only veneered upon them. “His words fly up, his thoughts remain below.” When he is poetical he is never in earnest. Sometimes his speeches are merely oratorical, and made from habit and for effect; sometimes they are hypocritical, and used to conceal his real intentions; and sometimes they are the expression of an inflamed and diseased imagination stimulated by superstition. But they are generally bombastic and swelling in tone, and are so intended to be. His habit of making speeches and inventing curious conceits is so strong, that he even “unpacks his heart with words” when alone, so as to leave himself free and direct to act. Thus, in one of his famous soliloquies, mark the unreal quality of all the pretended feeling, the mixture of immorality, bombast, and hypocrisy, the assonances and alliterations, the plays upon words, the extravagant figures, all showing the excitability of the brain and not of the heart:— “If _it were done_ when ’tis _done_, then _’twere_ well _It were done_ quickly. If th’ assassination _C_ould trammel up the _c_onsequence, and _c_atch, With his _surcease_, _success_; that but this blow Might _be_ the _be-all_ and the _end-all here_, But _here_, upon this bank and shoal of time,— We’d jump the life to come.” Then, after some questions about killing his guest, his kinsman, his king, which would seem honest, but for what comes after and for the utter reckless immorality which has gone before these words, his imagination excites itself, and runs into a wild and extravagant figure which means nothing. Duncan’s virtues, he says,— “Will plead like angels _t_rumpet-_t_ongued against The _d_eep _d_amnation of his _t_aking-off.” No sooner does he begin to swell and alliterate again than he goes wild:— “And pity, like a _n_aked _n_ew-_b_orn _b_abe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, _That tears shall drown the wind_.” This is pure rant, and intended to be so. It is the product of an unrestrained imagination which exhausts itself in the utterance. But it neither comes from the heart nor acts upon the heart. Again, in the soliloquy of the air-drawn dagger, the superstitious, visionary Macbeth, who always projects his fancies into figures and phantoms, after addressing this “false creation Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,”