In some respects, the conceptions of Shakspeare have not found the later actors and actresses to be profitable allies, in so far as they have put a private stamp upon their favorite characters, and have levied duty upon his fancy that prefers free-trade even to direct dealing clear of middlemen with every heart. So does every sect hang over the great stream of the Bible, see its own face reflected there, and languish for it. Shakspeare's pages surprise actors with their own temperament, and make them long to embody it. So that our Shakspearean impressions are decided for us, and descend to our children through the style or school of great histrionic families, in the same way that congenital traits travel out of the past into the future: the traditional studies of great theatrical performers propagate themselves. Their excellences cannot be ignored, and they quite plausibly vindicate themselves as pure Shakspearean intentions. We accept these renderings, and soon become disturbed to have them challenged and displaced. It is a great but willing tribute which we pay to the genius of the artist when we confide the imagination of Shakspeare to his interpretations; just as we despatch our diamond to be ground and set. He sends it back to us flashing from facets which describe his individual skill. But, in consequence of this genial submission of the spectator to the impressive portraiture, there arises a prejudice that Shakspeare could not have conceived otherwise, and that the character cannot and ought not to be repealed. In this way, for instance, some famous women have accustomed us to a Lady Macbeth who is full of grandeur, in whose solid and sombre person a suppressed cruelty smoulders. The verses protrude like claws of tigers; they clutch and rend: you may expect to overhear the lapping. The lower jaw of this conception is too square: the teeth of it are too relentlessly closed upon a victim. There is not an unoccupied space on cheek or brow where love can colonize; for all the space is pre-empted by a ravin to glut a lust for power. The woman's husband is only a lackey who must be whipped with scorpion phrases up to the deed that makes a queen of her. She detects a flavor of the milk of human kindness in him; and it makes her scowl till she shrieks to have the ministers of darkness turn her own milk to gall. She is the woman to carry back the daggers with the bluff composure of a butcher, and hoping to find that Duncan still bleeds, so that she may gild the faces of the grooms. You would not come upon her rampaging at midnight with a candle, rubbing at imaginary stains, and conning her secrets with fixed glassy eyes; for she is firmly constructed to know the blessedness of a bed and the balm of being conscienceless. Of such a wife Macbeth might well have said, "She should have died hereafter;" but she would not have found any time at all for such a weakness. I cannot discover the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare in this too robust delineation.