Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 2.djvu/149

 12 s. ii. AUG. 19, i9i6.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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The folio edition prints the concluding lines thus :

Paddock calls : anon

Fair is foul, and foul is fair,

Hover through the fog and filthy air ;

and as if they were to be spoken by the three witches in chorus. Most editors now give the line " Paddock calls : anon " only to the second witch, some making a further division by giving the " anon " to the third witch, leaving the last two lines only to be said in chorus. This last is the method of the "Globe" edition. "Paddocks" are large, croaking frogs or toads, and the glossarists define " Paddock " here as " a familiar spirit in the form of a huge toad," a surmise originated, I suppose, by " Pad- dock" being in the singular, and followed by " anon " a servant's term for coming. But it is possible " anon " may here be a word of direction or command meaning " quickly," " at once." Perhaps the im- pression intended to be conveyed by the witches' words is that they know by the croaking of the frogs or toads that the thunderstorm is breaking the fair which is foul to them gaining the upper hand and so, while the atmosphere about them is still leaden, thick, and humid, the trio speedily vanish.

In the other witch scene of the first act the three degrees of the witches are well maintained. Following Holinshed's ' The Historic of Macbeth,' on which he based his play, and whence he borrowed the three weird sisters, Shakespeare makes the first witch only salute Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, a title he knows he already possesses by his father's death. The second witch goes a little further towards prophecy, but it would be then known at Duncan's court that Macbeth was Thane of Cawdor. It is the third witch that gives the " more than mortal knowledge " :

Thou shalt be king hereafter J

To Banquo's questioning, the novice can only answer :

Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. The graduate's

Not so happy, yet much happier, is not more satisfying. The mistress of high degree alone tells Banquo really some- thing:

Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.

The ingredients thrown by the witches into the cauldron in the opening cavern scene of Act IV. display well, also, the degrees of their powers. The first witch only

throws two ingredients, " poisoned entrails,"

and

Toad that under a cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Sweltered venom, sleeping got ;

afterwards adding two more

sow's blood, that bath eaten Her nine farrow : grease, that's sweaten Prom the murderer's gibbet,

when Macbeth demands to see the appari- tions. All these ingredients would be truly local and comparatively easy to be got. The second witch's quota is more numerous,. totalling, with the cooling " baboon's blood," ten :

Fillet of a fenny snake In the cauldron boil and bake ? Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing.

These, too, could mostly be got near at hand, and without much trouble. The most powerful share comes from the third witch, an unlucky thirteen of ugly and far-fetched things :

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy ; maw and gulf Of the ravined salt-sea shark ; Root of hemlock, digged i' the dark ; Liver of blaspheming Jew ; Gall of goat, and slips of yew Slivered in the moon's eclipse ; Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips ; Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-delivered by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab ; Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.

W. H. PINCHBECK

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FORGOTTEN MAGAZINES.

AN attempt was made by Pisanus Fraxi (H. S. Ashbee), in ' Catena Librorum Tacen- dorum ' (London, 1885), to compile a bibliography of the numerous ribald mis- cellanies which flourished at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine- teenth centuries. The list, however, is very imperfect. Mr. Ashbee, very rightly, never described a publication that he had not examined, and these books are so seldom met with that it is not surprising that many of them escaped his notice. It is doubtful whether even the British Museum thirty years ago possessed a complete set, as I believe it does now, of the three most notorious of these periodicals. The parent of them all, however, is no rarity, for owing