A recent critic has spoken of the Poet-Laureate’s “wonderful skill in creating a perfectly real and living scene—such as always might, and perhaps somewhere does, exist in external nature—for the theatre of the feeling he is about to embody, and yet a scene every feature of which helps to make the emotion more real and vivid.” Careful students of Shakespeare know how truly these words apply to almost every one of his plays. He leaves not only the impression of each character deeply graven on your memory; but the season and the scenery which encompassed them, though perhaps not above a line or two are given to them, rise before us almost as indelibly. To take one sample out of many. In “Macbeth,” for instance, how does the scenery at every turn answer to the action and the emotion! For the first appearance of the witches there is the blasted heath, the thunder and lightning; then, as the key-note to Lady Macbeth’s fell purpose, there is— “The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements.” But when King Duncan himself, with his retinue, appears, the whole aspect of things is changed, and the gracious disposition of the old king comes out very naturally in the view he takes of the castle in which he was so soon to meet his doom:— “This castle has a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.” Banquo replies:— “This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry that the heaven’s breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle; Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, The air is delicate.” The castle, with its buttresses and battlements, its high gables and overhanging towers, lends itself as readily to the pleasant humor of the kindly king that calm afternoon, as it will do to the horror and the gloom of the morrow. Then the night in which the murder was done is quite such a night as often comes in dead winter, yet fits in so well with the deed and the feeling it awakened in men’s hearts. “_Lennox._ The night has been unruly: where we lay Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death And other prodigies. _Macb._ ’Twas a rough night. _Len._ My young remembrance cannot parallel A fellow to it.” This is the talk that passes just before the murder is known. And after it is known, this is the kind of day that follows: “By the clock, ’tis day, And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.” Again, as twilight brings on, the night which is to see Banquo taken out of the way, Macbeth exclaims—