FullReads

Smooth sliding without step.

This hemistich will afford the true reading of this place, which is, I think, to be corrected thus:

–and wither’d murder,
–thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin ravishing, slides tow’rds his design,
Moves like a ghost.

Tarquin is, in this place, the general name of a ravisher, and the sense is: Now is the time in which every one is asleep, but those who are employed in wickedness, the witch who is sacrificing to Hecate, and the ravisher, and the murderer, who, like me, are stealing upon their prey.

When the reading is thus adjusted, he wishes with great propriety, in the following lines, that the earth may not hear his steps.

(c) And take the present horror from the time.
Which now suits with it.–

I believe every one that has attentively read this dreadful soliloquy is disappointed at the conclusion, which, if not wholly unintelligible, is at least obscure, nor can be explained into any sense worthy of the author. I shall, therefore, propose a slight alteration,

–Thou sound and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my where-about,
And talk–the present horror of the time!–
That now suits with it.–

Macbeth has, in the foregoing lines, disturbed his imagination by enumerating all the terrours of the night; at length he is wrought up to a degree of frenzy, that makes him afraid of some supernatural discovery of his design, and calls out to the stones not to betray him, not to declare where he walks, nor to talk.–As he is going to say of what, he discovers the absurdity of his suspicion, and pauses, but is again overwhelmed by his guilt, and concludes that such are the horrours of the present night, that the stones may be expected to cry out against him:

That now suits with it.

He observes in a subsequent passage, that on such occasions stones have been known to move. It is now a very just and strong picture of a man about to commit a deliberate murder, under the strongest convictions of the wickedness of his design.

NOTE XXI.

SCENE IV.

Len.
The night has been unruly; where we lay
Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’th’air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion, and confused events,
New-hatch’d to the woeful time.
The obscure bird clamour’d the live-long night:
Some say, the earth was fev’rous, and did shake.

These lines, I think, should be rather regulated thus:

–prophesying with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confused events.
New-hatch’d to th’woeful time, the obscure bird
Clamour’d the live-long night. Some say, the earth
Was fev’rous and did shake.

A prophecy of an event new-hatch’d, seems to be a prophecy of an event past. The term new-hatch’d is properly applicable to a bird, and that birds of ill omen should be new-hatch’d to the woeful time is very consistent with the rest of the prodigies here mentioned, and with the universal disorder into which nature is described as thrown, by the perpetration of this horrid murder.

NOTE XXII.
–Up, up, and see
The great doom’s image, Malcolm, Banquo,
As from your graves rise up.–

The second line might have been so easily completed, that it cannot be supposed to have been left imperfect by the author, who probably wrote,

–Malcolm! Banquo! rise!
As from your graves rise up.–

Many other emendations, of the same kind, might be made, without any greater deviation from the printed copies, than is found in each of them from the rest.

NOTE XXIII.

Macbeth
.
–Here, lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature,
For ruin’s wasteful entrance: there, the murtherers
Steep’d in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech’d with gore.–