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Rh ing sovereignty, differ from the witch-sisterhood which appears in Shakespeare's tragedy. Those wondrous women in the Northern tale are plainly Valkyries, terrible divinities of the air, who, sweeping over battle-fields, determine victory or defeat, and who are to be regarded as the true directresses of human destiny, the last, in the warlike North, being dependent on the issue of battle. Shakespeare changed these into mischief-making witches, stripped them of all the terrible grace and charm of Northern enchantment, made of them hybrid half-women who practise tremendous ghostly delusions, and brew destruction from malicious mischief or at the bidding of hell. They are servants of the evil one, and he who is be- fooled by their sayings goes body and soul to destruction. Shakespeare has therefore translated the old heathenish deities of fate and their dignified magic blessing into Christian, and the ruin of his hero is therefore not a predetermined necessity, or something absolutely and sternly unavoidable, as in the ancient fate, but the result of those allurements of hell which cast their nets around the human heart. Macbeth succumbs to Satan, the prime evil.

It is interesting to compare the witches of Shakespeare with those of other English poets. We observe that Shakespeare after all could not