indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind,
(though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct
therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the
greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on,"
exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an
attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he
do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with
_him_; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which
we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,--not a
sympathy[1] of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of
thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one
overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific
mace." But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to,
there must be raging some great storm of passion,--jealousy, ambition,
vengeance, hatred,--which will create a hell within him; and into this hell
we are to look.

[Footnote 1: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a
word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has
become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the
word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in
its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of
another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it
is made a mere synonyme of the word _pity_; and hence, instead of saying
"sympathy _with_ another," many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of
"sympathy _for_ another."]

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty
of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his
hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife