AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 229 



And then, accumulating, as it were, the concentration of all hu- 

 man misery upon him, he continues, — 



** Still it cry'd ' sleep no more !' to all the house, 



* Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor 



Shall sleep no more ; Macbeth shall sleep no more.' " 



This appears to strike all minds, like the punishment of Cain, that 

 it was a retribution too great to bear ; and all the great actors who 

 have personated this character — Garrick, John Kemble, Kean, 

 Young, and Macready — throw expressions of the most acute agony 

 into the words "Macbeth shall sleep no more!" Macbeth, when 

 visited by the Physician, who informs him that his queen is not so 

 sick, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from 

 her rest, is aware from what source the indisposition proceeds, and 

 directs his mode of cure by recommending his attention to the state 

 of his patient's mind, in one of the most pathetic passages of this 

 noble play ; 



*' Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 

 Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 

 Rase out the written troubles of the brain, 

 And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, 

 Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff 

 Which weighs upon the heart." 



We now revert to the scene in which Lady Macbeth is introduced 

 as a somnambulist and sleep-talker, disclosing, by fragments, the 

 past scenes of her guilty life. And here the poet, as in the cases 

 of insanity in Lear, Hamlet, and Ophelia, has shewn himself a cor- 

 rect physiologist, and a judicious metaphysician. As in the case of 

 the youth, which I have related, and in most others of inveterate 

 Paroniria loquens, we have the Memory playing a part almost as im- 

 portant as the Imagination, and Lady ]Macbeth's mind constantly 

 dwells upon her remembrance of the murders of Duncan and Banquo. 

 She is transported by the Imagination of her dream, as we learn from 

 her disclosures during sleep, to the castle of her husband, as Thane of 

 Cawdor, and the daggers, the bell, and the bleeding Duncan are 

 present to her fancy, with all the attendant scenery of that awful 

 hour. She is introduced attempting to wash spots of blood from 

 her hand, to clean which appears an attempt as vain, as to cast an 

 oblivion over the truth of her memory or the wanderings of her 

 imagination : — " Out, damned spot ! Will these hands ne'er be 

 clean? Here's the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of i'^rabia 



