but the present moment. Richard in the busy turbulence of his
projects never loses his self-possession, and makes use of every
circumstance that happens as an instrument of his long-reaching
designs. In his last extremity we can only regard him as a wild
beast taken in the toils: we never entirely lose our concern for
Macbeth; and he calls back all our sympathy by that fine close of
thoughtful melancholy:

My way of life is fallen into the sear,
The yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age,
As honour, troops of friends, I must not look to have;
But in their stead, curses not loud but deep,
Mouth-honour, breath, which the poor heart
Would fain deny and dare not.

We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably well; we
can conceive no one to play Macbeth properly, or to look like a man
that had encountered the Weird Sisters. All the actors that we have
ever seen, appear as if they had encountered them on the boards of
Covent Garden or Drury Lane, but not on the heath at Fores, and as
if they did not believe what they had seen. The Witches of Macbeth
indeed are ridiculous on the modern stage, and we doubt if the
furies of Aeschylus would be more respected. The progress of manners
and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time
perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy. Filch's picking pockets, in
the Beggars' Opera, is not so good a jest as it used to be: by the
force of the police and of philosophy, Lillo's murders and the
ghosts in Shakespeare will become obsolete. At last there will be
nothing left, good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre
or in real life. A question has been started with respect to the