qualities," she was condemned to be burned. Her death, however,
Sir Walter Scott[49] says, "was not, we are sorry to say, a sacrifice to
superstitious fear of witchcraft, but a cruel instance of wicked policy,
mingled with national jealousy and hatred. The Duke of Bedford, when the
ill-starred Jeanne fell into his hands, took away her life in order to
stigmatize her memory with sorcery, and to destroy the reputation she
had acquired among the French."

[49] "Demonology and Witchcraft," 1881, pp. 192, 193.

The cases of the Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore, also
immortalized by Shakespeare, are both referred to in the succeeding
pages.

The Witch of Brentford, mentioned by Mrs. Page in "The Merry Wives of
Windsor" (iv. 2), was an actual personage, the fame, says Staunton,[50]
of whose vaticinations must have been traditionally well known to an
audience of the time, although the records we possess of her are scant
enough. The chief of them is a black-letter tract, printed by William
Copland in the middle of the sixteenth century, entitled "Jyl of
Braintford's Testament," from which it appears she was hostess of a
tavern at Brentford.[51] One of the characters in Dekker and Webster's
"Westward Ho"[52] says, "I doubt that old hag, Gillian of Brainford, has
bewitched me."

[50] "Shakespeare," 1864, vol ii. p. 161.

[51] See Dyce's "Glossary," p. 51.

[52] Webster's Works, edited by Dyce, 1857, p. 238.

The witches in "Macbeth" are probably Scottish hags. As Mr. Gunnyon
remarks,[53] "They are hellish monsters, brewing hell-broth, having cats
and toads for familiars, loving midnight, riding on the passing storm,
and devising evil against such as offend them. They crouch beneath the
gibbet of the murderer, meet in gloomy caverns, amid earthquake
convulsions, or in thunder, lightning, and rain." Coleridge, speaking of
them, observes that "the weird sisters are as true a creation of
Shakespeare's as his Ariel and Caliban--fates, fairies, and materializing
witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any
representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet
presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar
prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists
in the imaginative disconnected from the good, they are the shadowy
obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, elemental avengers
without sex or kin."

[53] "Illustrati