Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/395

 more," which the parting soul of Duncan gave as it awoke and fled through the inhospitable palace. Macbeth murdered then the innocent sleep which might have been Nature's resource, but which no doctor can restore. Cure her of that? Cure me first of the infection that was caught at Duncan's bedside, and which spread to the partner of my night-horrors: we are both far gone beyond a doctor's art.

Still he pleads—"Canst thou not minister?"—in piteous forlornness against the better judgment which, when it recurs, prompts him to "throw physic to the, dogs." It is a plea which seems to visit the chamber of the wife who ruined herself for love. It is the visit of a yearning that her heart might be cleansed in the oblivion of innocence.

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart?"

If he had married a female butcher of the strongest-minded type, there would have been no fees to pay for doctor's attendance, and the bloom of regret would have been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that conscience might venture to suggest. A virago who could dash out the brains of her smiling babe as easily as nurse it,—more easily, forsooth, for how could Nature have endowed her person with the founts of maternity?—was not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for the ruin of Macbeth.