Equally apt and characteristic is another speech of Macduff's later in the same scene, after learning how "all his pretty chickens and their dam" have been put to death by the tyrant:
"Gentle Heaven, Cut short all intermission; front to front Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself; Within my sword's length set him; if he 'scape, Heaven forgive him too."
Macduff is a man of great simplicity, energy, and determination of character; and here we have all these qualities boiled down to the highest intensity, as would naturally be the effect of such news on such a man. And observe how much is implied in that little word _too_,--"Heaven forgive him too." As much as to say, "Let me once but have a chance at him, if I don't kill him, then I'm as great a sinner as he, and so God forgive us both!" I hardly know of another instance of so great a volume of meaning compressed into so few words. And how like it is to noble Macduff!
I could fill many pages with examples of this perfect suiting of the style to the mental states of the dramatic speakers, but must rest with citing a few more.
Hotspur is proverbially a man of impatient, irascible, headstrong temper. See now how all this is reflected in the very step of his language, when he has just been chafed into a rage by what the King has said to him about the Scottish prisoners:
"Why, look you, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods, Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke. In Richard's time,--what do you call the place?-- A plague upon 't!--it is in Glostershire;-- 'Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept, His uncle York;--where I first bow'd my knee Unto this king of smiles, this Bolingbroke;-- When you and he came back from Ravenspurg.-- Why, what a candy deal of courtesy This fawning greyhound then did proffer me! Look, _When his infant fortune came to age_, And, _Gentle Harry Percy_, and, _Kind cousin_,-- O, the Devil take such cozeners!"
Hotspur's spirit is so all-for-war, that he can think of nothing else; hence he naturally scorns poetry, though his soul is full of it. But poetry is so purely an impulse with him, that he is quite unconscious of it. With Glendower, on the contrary, poetry is a purpose, and he pursues it consciously. Note, then, in iii. 1, how this poetical mood shapes and tunes his style, when he interprets his daughter's Welsh to her English husband: