Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/366

 spoiled its metre. But although the introduction of Hecate, in Act iii. 5, is said to be not Shakspearean enough in relevancy to the play, it is altogether too Shakspearean in style for Middleton, who never could have written,—

"Great business must be wrought ere noon: Upon the corner of the moon There hangs a vaporous drop profound; I'll catch it ere it come to ground: And that, distill'd by magic sleights, Shall raise such artificial sprites As by the strength of their illusion Shall draw him on to his confusion."

And we must notice that Hecate thus introduces and accounts for the "artificial sprites,"—the apparitions which deceive Macbeth in Act iv. 1, and entice him to "be bloody, bold, and resolute." This scene is certainly Shakspeare's. It is therefore probable that he would have preceded it by some inkling of the deceptive nature of the armed head, the bloody child, and the child crowned.

On the ground of an apparently un-Shakspearean style of metre in Act i. 2, which introduces the wounded sergeant, several commentators credit that scene also to Middleton. It is said to be too slovenly and bombastic for Shakspeare.

It is unsafe to limit the critical treatment of Shakspeare's verse to metrical or verbal tests. Æsthetic emergencies will sometimes overrule the decisions of the sharpest critics who construct Shakspeare out of reputed peculiarities of his style. He escapes from them to be raggeder than we think is personal to him, broader