being suggested along with the way to it and growing as the way opens. We see them both communicated to a feminine mind, narrower, more intent and practical; because narrower, because more intent and practical, for the moment more courageous. (It was Eve that the Serpent, wily enough, selected to tempt.) Both Macbeth and his lady move to the deed under a law which—for a while—has usurped the true moral order and reversed it, he not without misgivings: the spectators all the while knowing the true order, yet held silent, watching the event. Outside the castle an owl hoots as Duncan is slain. The guilty man and woman creep back, whispering; and thereupon—what happens? A knocking on the door—a knocking followed by the growls of a drowsy if not drunken porter: "Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knocking again.) Knock, knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of Beëlzebub?" The stage direction admits Macduff, who in due course is to prove the avenger of blood: but the hand that knocks, the step on the threshold, are in truth those of the moral order returning pede claudo, demanding to be readmitted. From the instant of that first knock the ambitions of the pair roll back toward their doom as the law they have offended reasserts itself, and the witches' palindrome In girum imus noctu, ecce! steadily spells itself backward, letter by letter, to the awful sentence, Ecce ut consumimur igni!

This is to "idealise" in the right sense of the word. Fixing his mind on the Idea of two human beings, a man and a woman who trespass from the law of the great moral powers ordering the Universe (Man along with it) and are overtaken in that trespass and punished, Shakespeare disencumbers it of all that is trivial, irrelevant, non-essential. He takes the wickedest crime of which man can be guilty; not a mere naked murder, nor even a murder for profit, but the murder of a king by his sworn soldier, of a guest by his host, of a sleeping guest by the hand on which he has just bestowed a diamond. Can criminality be laid barer? He illustrates it again in two persons lifted above the common station; and he does this not (as I think) for the practical reason for which Aristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers—that the disasters of great persons are more striking than those of the small fry of mankind—that, as the height is, so will be the fall—or not for that reason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," because such persons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonably be expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to have more delicate ears for its harmonies. Who but a King should know most concerning moral law? Why is 

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