Hang those that talk of fear.-Give me mine armour. How does your patient, doctor?

Doct. Not so sick, my lord, As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, That keep her from her rest.

Macb.

Cure her of that:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doct.

Must minister to himself.

Therein the patient

Macb. Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it :— Come, put mine armour on; give me my staff:Seyton, send out.-Doctor, the thanes fly from me: Come, sir, despatch:-If thou couldst, doctor, cast The water of my land, find her disease, And purge it to a sound and pristine health, I would applaud thee to the very echo,

That should applaud again.-Pull't off, I say.What rhubarb, senna10, or what purgative drug, Would scour these English hence?-Hearest thou of them?

Doct. Ay, my good lord; your royal preparation Makes us hear something.

Macb.

Bring it after me.-
I will not be afraid of death and bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.

[Exit.

8 The following very remarkable passage in the Amadigi of Bernardo Tasso, which bears a striking resemblance to the words. of Macbeth, was first pointed out in Mr. Weber's edition of Ford :

"Ma chi puote con crbe, od argomenti
Guarir l'infermità del intelletto?"

Cant. xxxvi. St. 37.

• To cast the water was the empiric phrase for finding out disorders by the inspection of urine.

10 What rhubarb, senna.' The old copy reads cyme. The emendation is Rowe's.

Doct. Were I from Dunsinane away and clear, Profit again should hardly draw me here. [Exit.

SCENE IV.

Country near Dunsinane: A Wood in view.

Enter, with Drum and Colours, MALCOLM, old
SIWARD and his Son, MACDUFF, MENTETH, CATH-
ness, Angus, Lenox, Rosse, and Soldiers, marching.
Mal. Cousins, I hope the days are near at hand
That chambers will be safe.

Ment.

We doubt it nothing.

Siw. What wood is this before us?
Ment.

The wood of Birnam.

Mal. Let every soldier hew him down a bough1, And bear't before him; thereby shall we shadow The numbers of our host, and make discovery Err in report of us.

Sold.

It shall be done.

Siw. We learn no other, but the confident tyrant
Keeps still in Dunsinane, and will endure
Our setting down before't.

Mal.
"Tis his main hope:
For where there is advantage to be given2,
Both more and less3 have given him the revolt;
And none serve with him but constrained things,
Whose hearts are absent too.

Macb.
Let our just censures
Attend the true event, and put we on
Industrious soldiership.

A similar incident is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in his Northern History, lib. vii. cap. xx. De Strategemate Hachonis per Frondes.

2 For where there is advantage to be given. Dr. Johnson thought that we should read :

--where there is a vantage to be gone."

i. e. when there is an opportunity to be gone, all ranks desert him. We might perhaps read :—

where there is advantage to be gained.'

and the sense would be nearly similar, with less violence to the text of the old copy.

3 i. e. Greater and less, or high and low, those of all ranks.

Siw.
The time approaches,
That will with due decision make us know

What we shall say we have, and what we owe1.
Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate;
But certain issue strokes must arbitrate:

Towards which, advance the war.

[Exeunt, marching.

SCENE V.

Dunsinane. Within the Castle.

Enter, with Drums and Colours, MACBETH, SEYTON, and Soldiers.

Macb. Hang out our banners on the outward

walls;

The cry is still, They come: Our castle's strength
Will laugh a siege to scorn: here let them lie,
Till famine, and the ague, eat them up:

arc'd Were they not forc'd with those that should be

ours,

We might have met them dareful, beard to beard,
And beat them backward home. What is that

noise?

[A cry within, of women. Sey. It is the cry of women, my good lord. Macb. I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool'd To hear a night-shriek; and my fell1 of hair

4 What we shall say we have, and what we owe.' I think, with Mason, that Siward only means to say, in more pompous language, that the time approached which was to decide their fate.

• Arbitrate, determine.

6 It has been understood that local rhymes were introduced in plays to afford an actor the advantage of a more pointed exit, or to close the scene with additional force. Yet, whatever might be Shakspeare's motive for continuing such a practice, he often seems immediately to repent of it; and in this tragedy, as in other places, has repeatedly counteracted it by hemistichs, which destroy the effect, and defeat the supposed purpose of the antecedent couplets.

1--my fell of hair, my hairy part, my capillitium. Fell is skin, properly a sheep's skin with the wool on it. Thus in King Lear :

"The gougeres shall devour them flesh and fell.'
A fell-monger is still the denomination of a dealer in hides.

Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir

As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaught'rous thoughts, Cannot once start me.-Wherefore was that cry? Sey. The queen, my lord, is dead.

Macb. She should have died hereafter;

?

There would have been a time for such a word2.—
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time3;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.--

Enter a Messenger.

Thou com'st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.
Mess. Gracious my lord,

I shall report that which I say I saw,
But know not how to do it.

Macb.
Well, say, sir.
Mess. As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.
Macb.

Liar and slave4!

2 "There would have been a time for such a word.' Macbeth might mean that there would have been a more convenient time for such a word, for such intelligence. By a word certainly more than a single one was meant. Thus in King Richard II. :—

"The hopeless word of, never to return,
Breathe I against thee.'

Un mot sometimes means a sentence also in French: and we still say word was brought when intelligence is meant.

3 The last syllable of recorded time' seems to signify the utmost period fixed in the decrees of heaven for the period of life. The record of futurity is indeed no accurate expression; but as we only know transactions, past or present, the language of men affords no term for the volumes of prescience in which future events may be supposed to be written.

[Striking him] says the stage direction in the margin of all the modern editions; but this stage direction is not in the old copies it was first interpolated by Rowe; and is now omitted on the suggestion of the late Mr. Kemble. See his Essay on Macbeth and King Richard III. Lond. 1817, p. 111.

Mess. Let me endure your wrath, if't be not so: Within this three mile may you see it coming; I say, a moving grove.

Macb.

If thou speak'st false, Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive, Till famine cling5 thee: if thy speech be sooth, I care not if thou dost for me as much.—

I pull in resolution; and begin

To doubt the equivocation of the fiend,

That lies like truth: Fear not, till Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane;—and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane.-Arm, arm, and out!-
If this, which he avouches, does appear,
There is nor flying hence, nor tarrying here.
I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun,

And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.
Ring the alarum-bell:-Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness6 on our back.

SCENE VI.

[Exeunt.

The same. A Plain before the Castle.

Enter, with Drums and Colours, MALCOLM, old SIWARD, MACDUFF, &c. and their Army, with Boughs.

Mal. Now near enough; your leavy screens throw down,

And show like those you are:-You, worthy uncle,
Shall, with my cousin, your right noble son,
Lead our first battle: worthy Macduff, and we,

5 To cling, in the northern counties, signifies to shrivel, wither, or dry up. Clung-wood is wood of which the sap is entirely dried or spent. The same idea is well expressed by Pope in his version of the nineteenth Iliad, 166:

"Clung with dry famine, and with toils declin'd.

• Harness, armour..