Page:William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).djvu/60

30 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 indeed are ridiculous on the modern stage, and we doubt if the furies of Æschylus 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 Shakespear 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 originality of Shakespear's Witches, which has been well answered by Mr. Lamb in his notes to the "Specimens of Early Dramatic Poetry."—

"Though some resemblance may be traced