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formerly he instinctively and keenly felt, not only for any fellow-creature in real peril and calamity, but even for the fictitious distresses of tragical romance. In this beautiful passage, the tyrant, whose nature had been "full of the milk of human kindness," mournfully contemplates the dismal change produced in his humane (not timid) disposition, by the habitual practice of such cruelties, as have finally hardened his temper against any impression of sympathy, against all the charities of our nature.

Mr. Whateley and Mr. Steevens, while they regard these sentiments as proofs of timidity in Macbeth, unac-