What can be more dreadful than to implore the presence of night,
invested, not in common obscurity, but in the smoke of hell? Yet the
efficacy of this invocation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet
now seldom heard but in the stable, and _dun_ night may come or go
without any other notice than contempt.
If we start into raptures when some hero of the Iliad tells us that
[Greek: doru mainetai], his lance rages with eagerness to destroy; if we
are alarmed at the terrour of the soldiers commanded by Caesar to hew
down the sacred grove, who dreaded, says Lucan, lest the axe aimed at
the oak should fly back upon the striker:
--_Si robora sacra ferirent,
In sua credebaut redituras membra secures_;
None dares with impious steel the grove to rend,
Lest on himself the destin'd stroke descend;
we cannot surely but sympathise with the horrours of a wretch about to
murder his master, his friend, his benefactor, who suspects that the
weapon will refuse its office, and start back from the breast which he
is preparing to violate. Yet this sentiment is weakened by the name of
an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments: we
do not immediately conceive that any crime of importance is to be
committed with a _knife_; or who does not, at last, from the long habit
of connecting a knife with sordid offices, feel aversion rather than
terrour?
Macbeth proceeds to wish, in the madness of guilt, that the inspection
of heaven may be intercepted, and that he may, in the involutions of
infernal darkness, escape the eye of Providence.
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