Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/194

 *cator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven! Oh, come in, equivocator! "Yes, this is the very house for him to come to, where a treason has just been committed which will be unable to equivocate to Heaven. "I'll devil-porter it no farther: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." If the outer life is to gain admission at all again to this castle, this grotesque hint of the hell within undoes the gate appropriately: by no abrupt transition, and by the bridge of a perilous smile, human life is reached again. The Porter delays by his successive fancies, till we begin to grow impatient, like those emissaries of Heaven who shiver at the gate. This impatience, humorously created for us, introduces another human feeling to qualify our awe; and thus we rejoin our common humanity.

When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he seems to have admitted also a very garish and vulgar kind of day, that displays loosely some infirmities of men, unconscious of the more awful crime within,—a very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply on all objects without toning them. The Porter's disquisition upon drinking and lechery is apparently superfluous and revolting, but it is really well conceived; for we want something to carry our mood as far as possible away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts about discovering the deed, because Macbeth is about to enter. "Our knocking has awaked him." Then our