[Footnote 1:  Act I. sc. v. l. 2.]

[Footnote 2:  Mr. Fleay avoids the difficulty created by this passage, which alludes to the witches as “the weird sisters,” by supposing that these lines were interpolated by Middleton—­a method of criticism that hardly needs comment.  Act III. sc. iv. l. 134.]

[Footnote 3:  Act V. sc. v. l. 43.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid. sc. viii. l. 19.]

100.  Assuming, therefore, that the witch-nature of the sisters is conclusively proved, it now becomes necessary to support the assertion previously made, that good reason can be shown why Shakspere should have elected to represent witches rather than Norns.

It is impossible to read “Macbeth” without noticing the prominence given to the belief that witches had the power of creating storms and other atmospheric disturbances, and that they delighted in so doing.  The sisters elect to meet in thunder, lightning, or rain.  To them “fair is foul, and foul is fair,” as they “hover through the fog and filthy air.”  The whole of the earlier part of the third scene of the first act is one blast of tempest with its attendant devastation.  They can loose and bind the winds,[1] cause vessels to be tempest-tossed at sea, and mutilate wrecked bodies.[2] They describe themselves as “posters of the sea and land;"[3] the heath they meet upon is blasted;[4] and they vanish “as breath into the wind."[5] Macbeth conjures them to answer his questions thus:—­

    “Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
    Against the churches; though the yesty waves
    Confound and swallow navigation up;
    Though bladed corn be lodged, and trees blown down;
    Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;
    Though palaces and pyramids do slope
    Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
    Of nature’s germens tumble all together,
    Even till destruction sicken."[6]

[Footnote 1:  I. iii. 11, 12.]

[Footnote 2:  Act I. sc. iii. l. 28.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid. l. 32.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid. l. 77.]

[Footnote 5:  Ibid. ll. 81, 82.]

[Footnote 6:  Act IV. sc. i. ll. 52-60.]

101.  Now, this command over the elements does not form at all a prominent feature in the English records of witchcraft.  A few isolated charges of the kind may be found.  In 1565, for instance, a witch was burnt who confessed that she had caused all the tempests that had taken place in that year.  Scot, too, has a few short sentences upon this subject, but does not give it the slightest prominence.[1] Nor in the earlier Scotch trials recorded by Pitcairn does this charge appear amongst the accusations against the witches.  It is exceedingly curious to notice the utter harmless nature of the charges brought against the earlier culprits; and how, as time went on and the panic increased, they gradually deepened in colour, until no act was too gross, too repulsive, or too ridiculously impossible to be excluded from the indictment.  The following quotations from one of the earliest reported trials are given because they illustrate most forcibly the condition of the poor women who were supposed to be witches, and the real basis of fact upon which the belief in the crime subsequently built itself.