For Macduff—the pious—lion-hearted—affectionate Macduff, is prepared a fate, if possible, yet more awful. His castle—the scene of many a happy hour, many a fond and merry family sport, is about to be surprised. His wife, his babes “savagely slaughtered,”
“wife, children, servants,”
all that could be found, fiercely drawn down into the general ruin which the sinful heart of one man spreads around him. How truly is mortality painted in these events! How plainly we see what stuff life is made of! and how sternly are we taught the folly of supposing the end of man to be “here, on this bank and shoal of time.”
Malcolm, Donalbain, Rosse, and Angus, driven from their country by terror of the bloody tyrant—(now the beloved and trusted of all)—and lastly Lenox, whom we find at a later period in attendance on Macbeth, and the witness of his bursts of guilty and ferocious desperation, but at length joined with the advancing enemy.
Into the midst of this circle, on the brink of ruin when they think themselves most secure, enters Lady Macbeth. Her mere appearance touches a chord of terror in the soul of the reader, although they whom she addresses view her with very different feelings. The unsuspecting king greets in her his “honored hostess,” and pours out upon her a heart full of gratitude and love. The cruel hypocrite—so firm in the anticipation of guilt, so haughtily superior to all the prejudices of superstition—all the idle dreams of religion and a Providence—yet so ignorant of their real nature and destined to be so thoroughly wrecked in the tempest her rash hand is so eager to raise—replies with shameful effrontery and mature wickedness:
“all our service,
In every point twice done, and then done double,
Were poor and single business, to contend
Against those honors deep and broad, wherewith
Your majesty loads our house.”