_Couriers of air_
are _winds_, air in motion. _Sightless_ is _invisible_.
I.vii.25 (430,8) That tears shall drown the wind] Alluding to the
remission of the wind in a shower.
I.vii.28 (430,9) _Enter Lady_] The arguments by which lady Macbeth
persuades her husband to commit the murder, afford a proof of
Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature. She urges the excellence and
dignity of courage, a glittering idea which has dazzled mankind from age
to age, and animated sometimes the house-breaker, and sometimes the
conqueror; but this sophism Macbeth has for ever destroyed, by
distinguishing true from false fortitude, in a line and a half; of which
it may almost be said, that they ought to bestow immortality on the
author, though all his other productions had been lost:
_I dare do all that become a man,
Who dares do more, is none_.
This topic, which has been always employed with too much success, is
used in this scene with peculiar propriety, to a soldier by a woman.
Courage is the distinguishing virtue of a soldier, and the reproach of
cowardice cannot be borne by any man from a woman, without great
impatience.
She then urges the oaths by which he had bound himself to murder Duncan,
another art of sophistry by which men have sometimes deluded their
consciences, and persuaded themselves that what would be criminal in
others is virtuous in them; this argument Shakespeare, whose plan
obliged him to make Macbeth yield, has not confuted, though he might
easily have shewn that a former obligation could not be vacated by a
latter: that obligations laid on us by a higher power, could not be
over-ruled by obligations which we lay upon ourselves.
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