The apparitions which he sees only haunt him
in his sleep; nor does he live like Macbeth in a waking dream.
Macbeth has considerable energy and manliness of character; but then
he is 'subject to all the skyey influences'. He is sure of nothing
but the present moment. Richard in the busy turbulence of his
projects never loses his self-possession, and makes use of every
circumstance that happens as an instrument of his long-reaching
designs. In his last extremity we can only regard him as a wild
beast taken in the toils: we never entirely lose our concern for
Macbeth; and he calls back all our sympathy by that fine close of
thoughtful melancholy:
My way of life is fallen into the sear,
The yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age,
As honour, troops of friends, I must not look to have;
But in their stead, curses not loud but deep,
Mouth-honour, breath, which the poor heart
Would fain deny and dare not.
We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably well; we
can conceive no one to play Macbeth properly, or to look like a man
that had encountered the Weird Sisters. All the actors that we have
ever seen, appear as if they had encountered them on the boards of
Covent Garden or Drury Lane, but not on the heath at Fores, and as
if they did not believe what they had seen.
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