NOTE XVI.

SCENE. X.

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
housebreaker, 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 may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

This topick, 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 shown that a former obligation could not be vacated by a