on't?[2] Live you, or are you ought
That man may question?[3]

_Macbeth._ Speak if you can, what are you?

_1st Witch._ All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis![4]

_2nd Witch._ All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Cawdor![5]

_3rd Witch._ All hail, Macbeth! thou shall be king hereafter.[6]

This is so accurate a dramatization of the parallel passage in
Holinshed, and so entire in itself, that there is some temptation to ask
whether it was not so written at first, and the interpolated lines
subsequently inserted by the author. Whether this be so or not, the
question must be put--Why, in such a passage, did Shakspere insert three
lines of most striking description of the appearance of witches? Can any
other reason be suggested than that he had made up his mind to replace
the "goddesses of Destinie" by the witches, and had determined that
there should be no possibility of any doubt arising about it?

[Footnote 1: Three women in strange and wild apparel,]

[Footnote 2: resembling creatures of elder world,]

[Footnote 3: whome when they attentivelie beheld, woondering much at the
sight, the first of them spake and said;]

[Footnote 4: 'All haile, Makbeth, thane of Glammis' (for he had latelie
entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father
Sinell).]

[Footnote 5: The second of them said; 'Haile, Makbeth, thane of
Cawder.']

[Footnote 6: But the third said; 'All haile, Makbeth, that heereafter
shalt be king of Scotland.']

95. The next objection is, that the sisters exercise powers that witches
did not possess. They can "look into the seeds of time, and say which
grain will grow, and which will not." In other words, they foretell
future events, which witches could not do. But this is not the fact. The
recorded witch trials teem with charges of having prophesied what things
were about to happen; no charge is more common. The following, quoted by
Charles Knight in his biography of Shakspere, might almost have
suggested the simile in the last-mentioned lines. Johnnet Wischert is
"indicted for passing to the green growing corn in May, twenty-two years
since or thereby, sitting thereupon tymous in the morning before the
sun-rising, and being there found and demanded what she was doing,
thou[1] answered, I shall tell thee; I have been peeling the blades of
the corn. I find it will be a dear year, the blade of the corn grows
withersones [contrary to the course of