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RV 342 (Rh) things to come, and see them as though they were present.’ The reader will apply these phrases and sentences at once to passages in Macbeth. They are all taken from Scot’s first chapter, where he is retailing the current superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily accessible authority. He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion, the ‘women’ who met Macbeth ‘were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.’ But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he used what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the phrase ‘weird sisters,’ which certainly no more suggested to a London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are ‘instruments of darkness’; the spirits are their ‘masters’ ( i. 63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate appears are Shakespeare’s, that will not help the