310 THE BIRD WATCHER 
with a late reading @ Richard ITI. I love that play ; 
almost more than ambition, perhaps, the keynote 
to its hero-villain’s character is to be sought in 
his tremendous energy and intellectual activity. 
These are so great that they, to a large extent, 
guard him against the intolerable anguish of remorse 
—that constant attendant on the undiseased evil- 
doer—so that he fares better than Macbeth, who is 
inferior to Richard in both these respects, and whose 
more poetic and sensitive nature is much against 
him. Not that Macbeth is not an energetic and able 
man, but he is only normally so, while Richard’s 
working qualities are abnormal. His energy, especi- 
ally, is more like that of a Napoleon or Julius Cesar. 
It is such a mighty and rapidly-moving stream, that, 
hurried along by it, he has no leisure to repine. It 
floats his crimes easily, one may say, making little 
dancing boats of them, whereas those of Macbeth are 
like huge vessels in a stream that has hardly volume 
enough to bear them. Is it not, in fact, almost im- 
possible to feel mental depression, so long as the brain 
is very actively employed? It is in the calms and 
lulls of this activity that disagreeable reflections force 
themselves upon us, just as rain that has been kept 
from falling by a violent wind, falls as soon as it sub- 
sides. Accordingly, though Richard’s robuster nature 
goes almost scot free by day—at least, for a consider- 
able time—it becomes the prey of conscience by night, 
when the huge energy of his disposition is in abeyance ; 
when, in Tennyson’s language, “to sleep he gives his 
