Lies heavy on me: thou art so far before,
That swiftest wing of recompense is slow
To overtake thee. Would thou hadst less deserved;
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine! only I have left to say,
More is thy due, than more than all can pay.
Certainly were I a king I should either not read Macbeth, or the reading of it would often disturb my peace and check the flow of my feelings and opinions. Hence royalty is, and is obliged to be, closed in itself—surrounded by cold forms and highly artificial ceremonies, removed from the action of the common, simple and sweet impulses and emotions of life—removed from friendship—love—ordinary social society—from the pleasures of confidence and independence—from visits and acquaintance-making, and many others which the private subject enjoys and derives as much unconscious pleasure from as from the air and sun. If I were a king I should never trust a human being. I should feel ever as if I were led along blindfold to suit purposes, of the existence of which I could not be aware—to injure people whom perhaps, if I knew them, I should desire to protect—and to aid others, who, were their real natures open to my inspection, I might perhaps be the first to punish. I should shrink from offers of service lest, even in them who had most served me, might lurk a Macbeth to defend, honor and ruin me. The master of a household finds it impossible to follow with his eye or his mind the daily course of his own domestics. Watch them as he may they are sure of continually returning opportunities to deceive and cheat him. Neglect and fraud and duplicity, although on a minute scale, are in perpetual operation, the prevention of which, even when detected, baffles his utmost address. There are few families in the world—at least in the old European metropolises—where a certain description of dishonesty is not almost openly practiced and even consciously permitted. I have heard an anecdote of a master who made his servant an offer to add twenty pounds a year to his annual wages on condition of his swearing not to cheat him out of a cent. The valet, after calculating half an hour, declined the proposition. In humanity, the great central pervading principle is selfishness. It exists in every bosom, as attraction exists in every object. In some it is modified, mastered and even beautified by warmth of heart, sincerity of religion and clearness of understanding. In others it is augmented beyond its natural proportions, by the peculiar temperament and the want of moral and intellectual cultivation. In the slender opportunities I have had of observing the world I have been particularly and painfully struck with the humiliating truth that selfishness—deepening, from the mere instinct of preservation, into various shades of meanness, dishonesty and crime, is the great passion of the world. Men are often intellectually and politically great notwithstanding it and perhaps in consequence of it, but no one is morally great without escaping from its earth-attracting and inglorious influence. This passion increases in the bosom of the bad, in proportion to the greatness of the object. In the precincts of a court, (although it is a vulgar error to suppose virtue and disinterestedness may not exist there also,) it becomes more condensed—more profound, more plausibly disguised, but more quietly and universally pervading than elsewhere. In a royal circle nearly every other feeling is extinct, and the pressure for favor and the sacrifice of minor (and how much more graceful and noble) considerations at the shrine of courtly or fashionable ambition are, to the observing eye, very visible beneath the glittering surface of society. The king knows no body. He has no opportunity of seeing, hearing or judging. The good and the bad address him alike in the language of homage and adulation, and he comes at last to lose his natural sympathies with the human race—to regard them as inferiors—machines, cattle. To him they are so. Before him they are contemptible. They too often lay aside in his presence, and in proportion as they approach his throne, their claims to respect and their habits of candor, dignity and goodness, and a crowd of people are rarely presented to a king without their overvaluing some things and undervaluing others most lamentably. At the same time the sovereign himself, however good and great he may be, cannot well be considered without a certain degree of regret and commiseration, when one reflects that the hypocrisy always more or less existing in polite society is redoubled in his presence, and that he has always lived and is destined ever to continue to live in a mist. The unveiled face of human nature he is doomed never to see. He is continually trusting things which nearly concern him to men of whom he knows literally nothing. Then Duncan with his kingly credulity hears his murderer declare—
Macbeth. The service and the loyalty I owe
In doing it pays itself. Your highness’ part
Is to receive our duties; and our duties