Macbeth endeavours to escape from reflection on his crimes by repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the meditation of future mischief.  This is not the principle of Richard’s cruelty, which resembles the wanton malice of a fiend as much as the frailty of human passion.  Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and retaliation by necessity; to Richard, blood is a pastime.—­There are other decisive differences inherent in the two characters.  Richard may be regarded as a man of the world, a plotting, hardened knave, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, and the means to secure them.—­Not so Macbeth.  The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to his character.  From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear; and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy.  He sees sights not shown to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music.  All is tumult and disorder within and without his mind; his purposes recoil upon himself, are broken and disjointed; he is the double thrall of his passions and his evil destiny.  Richard is not a character either of imagination or pathos, but of pure self-will.  There is no conflict of opposite feelings in his breast.  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.  The Witches of Macbeth indeed are ridiculous on the modern stage, and we doubt if the furies of Aeschylus would be more respected.  The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy.  Filch’s picking pockets, in the