Now when the ghost of Banquo enters to occupy Macbeth's chair, the actor of the king's part need not strain himself to put on the highest degree of an appalled feeling. "Are you a man?" whispers his wife; and Macbeth gives the true tone to his share of the scene when he answers,-- "Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that Which might appal the devil." He starts, to be sure; but he simply remarks, "The table's full." "Here is a place reserved, sir." "Where?" he exclaims, so little annihilated by the painting of his own consciousness. It has dazed him, as when a mirror shifts distant sunlight full into the eyes: they blink, and judgment cannot readjust the sight. So he dimly asks, "Which of you have done this?" He is not "distilled to jelly with the act of fear," but simply amazed at this reproduction, so quick and palpable, of the deed just described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing that, put those "twenty trenched gashes" into his mind, whence they dripped over the chair of state. His talent for this spectral extemporizing has been indulged too often to overtake him with a special wonder. This unexpected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened:-- "Thou canst not say I did it: never shake Thy gory locks at me." His wife blames his "flaws and starts" at such a moment of festivity when ceremony ought to be the sauce to meat; but they are not the ague-fits of a man who is dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The image of his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the guests in a way that suggests to them a sudden flightiness:-- "Prythee, see there! behold! look! lo! how say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too." This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of horror. In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify him with the deed of which Banquo was the horrible shadow, his temperament required that the ghost should vanish and reappear at the moment when he recovers composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sudden change of demeanor, that he was usually familiar with these coinages of his brain. To whatever ecstasy his feeling rose, with or without his wife's complicity, Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth was so fluent with these bodiless creations that he had naturalized the night-side of his mind. Therefore, Banquo must re-enter precisely when Macbeth drinks to the general joy, and to the dead man in particular. Shakspeare knew the moment when to spill Macbeth's wine and all his hardihood by putting out a disembodied hand to strike the goblet from his grasp. It was the very nick of time, but it was in the man's own temper. Let us see how it was. The alteration of demeanor from astonishment to the abjectness of a guilty terror slips out of Macbeth's conviviality into the company, as he calls for wine and drinks "love and health to all." At the rim of his goblet he can even banter with his consciousness of murder: he is in a frame to enjoy proposing the health of