It is the fashion to consider Macbeth a spotless and noble soul, ensnared by the toils of the fiends, and pulled down from heaven to hell by the chance meeting of the weird sisters on the heath. There is a serious objection to this view. It makes machines of men. It takes from us the most obvious and sublime attribute of an immortal being, viz: free agency. If a high-minded and God-revering mortal is unprotected against the attacks of supernatural beings—if foul witches may watch for him in unguarded moments, and weave around his enchanted feet the fatal snares of crime and death, then are we truly a wretched race. But this is not Shakspeare’s creed. This is not the character of the tragedy. Macbeth was a villain. He had deliberately adopted vice as his god long before the fiends were permitted to patter with him. They come as a _consequence_ not as a _cause_ of wickedness. The withered and wild sisters on the blasted heath were conjured up by his own cherished weaknesses and _secret_ deeds.[4] They were the haggard and hellish impersonations of his own hidden thoughts and passions. He was not the pure, generous, heaven-adoring person he is represented. The germs of his guilt he had received into his heart by himself years before, and they lay shooting there in silence, only waiting the quickening beam of opportunity—waiting the first, feeblest temptation to start forth in all their force. He was one of those fair-_seeming_ men who pass for honest and noble. The world contains now, as then, many such. Many a man with an uplifted brow and a clear name, waits only _occasion_ to prove himself a scoundrel. It is such specious hypocrites that gather around them (as the smell of carrion does the hawk and vulture) the plotting witches who watch for power over the children of men. They had never tempted the pure good old King Duncan. He might have passed the blasted heath every day of his life, and these hags would never have dreamed of appearing to him. His soul was not prepared for their wiles. But that of Macbeth—as well as that of his stern wife—was corrupted by the whole tenor of their previous life. Had there been left no evidence of this, I should still have asserted it. The innocent—the pure in heart—they who daily commune with their Maker—who acknowledge their weakness and danger when left to themselves—and implore humbly at his feet his all-sufficient aid—never fall victims to the accursed fiends, whether they appear in the deformity of Paddock and Graymalkin, or disguised under the fair temptations of life. But Shakspeare has left proof enough in his tragedy. He meant to show, not (as is frequently asserted) the downfall of noble grandeur and unsuspecting innocence, but the destruction of a fair-showing, unsuspected villain—the wreck of a ship whose outward semblance was tall and imposing, but which was unseaworthy and destined to go down before the first gale.