What you have spoke, it may be so, perchance. This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues, To offer up a weak, poor innocent lamb, To appease an angry god. Macd. I am not treacherous. Mal. But Macbeth is. A good and virtuous nature may recoil, In an imperial charge. But I shall crave your pardon ; Macd. I have lost my hopes. Mal. Perchance, even there, where I did find my doubts. Why in that rawness' left you wife and child, (Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,) Without leave-taking?—I pray you, Let not my jealousies be your dishonours, But mine own safeties:-You may be rightly just, Macd. Bleed, bleed, poor country! Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, For goodness dares not check thee! wear thou thy wrongs, The title is affeer'd-Fare thee well, lord: I would not be the villain that thou think'st For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp, And the rich East to boot. Mal. What should he be ? Macd. (1) In that rawness, i. e. precipitately, without maturity of counsel. All the particulars of vice so grafted, That, when they shall be open'd, black Macbeth With my confineless harms. I grant him bloody, All continent impediments would o'erbear, Macd. Boundless intemperance In nature is a tyranny; it hath been In my most ill-compos'd affection, such This avarice Macd. Mal. But I have none: The king-becoming graces, As justice, verity, temperance, stableness, Acting in many ways. Nay, had I power, I should (1) Summer-seeming. Which has only a short duration, like summer. Some editions read summer-seeding, and others summer-teeming. (2) Portable, for bearable, endurable. Uproar the universal peace, confound All unity on earth. Macd. O Scotland! Scotland! Mal. If such a one be fit to govern, speak: I am as I have spoken. Macd. Fit to govern! No, not to live.-O nation miserable, With an untitled tyrant bloody-sceptred, When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again? By his own interdiction stands accurs'd, And does blaspheme his breed?-Thy royal father Died every day she lived. Fare thee well! These evils thou repeat'st upon thyself Have banish'd me from Scotland.-O, my breast, Mal. Macduff, this noble passion, Wip'd the black scruples, reconcil'd my thoughts Unspeak mine own detraction; here abjure For strangers to my nature. I never was forsworn ; No less in truth, than life: my first false speaking Is thine, and my poor country's, to command: 1 Now we'll together: And the chance, of goodness, 'Tis hard to reconcile. (1) Our warranted quarrel, i. e. our quarrel for which we have good warrant; our just cause of quarrel. Enter a Doctor. Mal. Well; more anon.-Comes the king forth, I pray you? The great assay of art; but, at his touch, Mal. I thank you, doctor. [Exit Doctor. 'Tis call'd the evil; A most miraculous work in this good king: The healing benediction.2 With this strange virtue, And sundry blessings hang about his throne, Macd. Enter ROSSE. See, who comes here? Mal. My countryman; but yet I know him not. Mal. I know him now: Good God, betimes remove Rosse. Sir, Amen. Macd. Stands Scotland where it did? Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot Alas, poor country; Be call'd our mother, but our grave: where nothing, Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air, (1) The malady convinces, &c.,-their sickness overcomes the greatest attempts of our art. (2) The healing benediction. Allusion is here made to the touching for the cure of the king's evil, which was commenced by Edward the Confessor, and practised by our sovereigns till the reign of Queen Anne, who was the last who exercised it. The famous Dr. Johnson is said to have been one of the last touched by her. The French kings also claimed this power. Is there scarce ask'd, for who; and good men's lives Dying, or ere they sicken. Macd. Too nice, and yet too true! O, relation, Mal. What's the newest grief? Rosse. That of an hour's age doth hiss the speaker; Each minute teems a new one. Macd. How does my wife? Rosse. Why, well. Macd. And all my children? Rosse. Well too. Macd. The tyrant has not batter'd at their peace? Rosse. No; they were well at peace, when I did leave them. Macd. Be not a niggard of your speech: How goes it? Rosse. When I came hither to transport the tidings, Which I have heavily borne, there ran a rumour Of many worthy fellows that were out; Mal. That Christendom gives out. Rosse. 'Would I could answer This comfort with the like! But I have words Macd. The general cause? or is it a fee-grief,1 What concern they? Rosse. Macd. If it be mine, Keep it not from me, quickly let me have it. Rosse. Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever, Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound, That ever yet they heard. Macd. Humph! I guess at it. (1) A fee-grief,—a peculiar and private sorrow. |