Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note.

Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.-Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,

And with thy bloody and invisible hand

43, 44. Hath...note.] Rowe. First 46. seeling] sealing Rowe, Pope.. line ends at peale, Ff, Knt, Del.

45

Pauli], She sigh, her thought, a dragon tho, Whose sherdes shinen as the sonne.' Ben Jonson, in his Sad Shepherd, says:— The scaly beetles with their habergeons? See also Cymb. III, iii, 20. Such another description of the beetle occurs in Chapman's Eugenia, 1614:-The beetle...with his knoll-like humming gave the dor Of death to men.'

TOLLET. The shard-born beetle is the beetle born in dung. Aristotle and Pliny mention beetles that breed in dung. Poets as well as natural historians have made the same observation. See Drayton's Ideas, 31: 'I scorn all earthly dung-bred scarabies.' So, Jonson [ed. Gifford, vol. i, p. 61]: But men of thy condition feed on sloth, As doth the beetle on the dung she breeds in.' That shard signifies dung, is well known in the North of Staffordshire, where cowshard is the word generally used for cow-dung.

RITSON. The shard-born beetle is, perhaps, the beetle born among shards, i. e., pieces of broken pots, tiles, and such-like things, which are frequently thrown together in corners as rubbish, and under which beetles may breed.

WHITE. A shard is any thin, brittle substance of small size. Job 'took a potsherd to scrape himself withal;' shirred eggs are so called because they are cooked in an earthen platter; and a cow-shard (the name is applied, I believe, to no other substance of the same nature) has its name because it is so thin and becomes scaly upon exposure to the air.

PATTERSON (p. 65). The beetle is furnished with two large membranaceous wings, which are protected from external injury by two very hard, horny wing-cases, or, as entomologists term them, elytra. The old English name was 'shard.' . . . These shards or wing-cases are raised and expanded when the beetle flies, and by their concavity act like two parachutes in supporting him in the air. Hence the propriety and correctness of Sh.'s description, the shard-borne beetle,' a description embodied in a single epithet.

6

CLARENDON. Shard' is derived from the Anglosaxon sceard, a fragment, generally of pottery. Tollet's reading is unquestionably wrong, though 'shard' means 'dung' in some dialects. 'Sharebud,' or 'sharnbud,' a provincial name for 'beetle,' is probably a corruption of scarabæus.

44. note] CLARENDON. Notoriety. There is perhaps in this passage a reference to the original meaning of the word, 'a mark or brand,' so that a deed of dreadful note' may signify a deed that has a dreadful mark set upon it.' Comp. Love's Lab. L. IV, iii, 125.

[See HIECKE, Appendix, p. 468. ED.]

46. seeling] NARES. To seel is to close the eyelids partially or entirely, by pass

Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

Which keeps me pale!-Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:

50

ing a fine thread through them. This was done to hawks till they became tractable. Hence metaphorically to close the eyes in any way.

DYCE (Gloss.) 'Siller les yeux. To seele, or sew up, the eye-lids (& thence also), to hoodwinke, blind, keepe in darknesse, depriue of sight!'-Cotgrave. To seel a hawk. Accipitris occulos consuere.'-Coles's Lat. and Eng. Dict.

49. bond] STEEVENS. This may be explained by Rich. III: IV, iv, 77, and Cymb. V, iv, 27.

KEIGHTLEY. We should read band, riming with hand.'

50. pale] STAUNTON (The Athenæum, 26 October, 1872). The context requires a word implying restraint, abridgment of freedom, &c., rather than one denoting dread. My impression has long been that the word should be paled. In the same sense as Macbeth afterwards exclaims in III, iv, 24.

thickens] STEEVENS. So in The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, Act I, sc. ult: 'Fold your flocks up, for the air 'Gins to thicken.'

MALONE. Again, in Spenser's Calendar, 1579: ‘But see, the welkin thicks apace.' 51. rooky] RODERICK (EDWARDS, Canons of Crit. p. 274, 1765). I should imagine Sh. intended to give us the idea of the gloominess of the woods at the close of the evening; and wrote,—' to th' murky (or dusky) wood:' words used by him on other like occasions, and not very remote from the traces of that in the

text.

STEEVENS. This may mean damp, misty, steaming with exhalations. It is only a North-Country variation of dialect from reeky. In Cor. III, iii, 121, we have 'the reek o' the rotten fens.' 'Rooky wood' indeed may signify a rookery, the wood that abounds with rooks; yet merely to say of the crow that he is flying to a wood inhabited by rooks, is to ad1 little immediately pertinent to the succeeding observation, viz. that' —— things of day begin to droop and drowse.' I cannot, therefore, help supposing our author wrote-'makes wing to rook i th' wood.' That is, to roost in it.

HARRY ROWE. A rooky wood is simply a wood where there are rookeries, and has nothing to do with the 'reek of rotten fens.'

FORBY. That is, foggy. Any East Anglian plough-boy would have instantly removed the learned commentator's doubt whether it had anything to do with rooks. [The same meaning is given in CARR's Craven Dialect, 1828; BROCKETT's North Country Words, 1829, and in MORRIS'S Glossary of Furness, 1869. The last adds: "Icel. rakr. "Roky, or mysty, nebulosus.”—Promp. Parv.' ED.]

MITFORD (Gent. Mag. Aug. 1844, p. 129). Crow' is the common appellation of the 'rook,' the latter word being used only when we would speak with precision, and never by the country people, as the word crow-keeper' will serve to show, which means the boy who keeps the rooks (not carrion crows) off the seed-corn. The carrion crow, which is the crow proper, being almost extinct, the necessity of distinguishing it from the rook has passed away in common usage. The passage,

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse.—
Thou marvell'st at my words: but hold thee still;
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill :

So, prithee, go with me.

53. Whiles] While Cap. Rann. preys] prey's FF, prey Pope, +, Steev. Knt.

55

[Exeunt.

55. strong themselves] themselves strong Ktly.

therefore, simply means, the rook hastens its evening flight to the wood where its fellows are already assembled,' and to our mind the rooky wood' is a lively and natural picture: the generic term 'crow' is used for the specific rook.'

CLARKE. The very epithet, 'rooky,' appears to us to caw with the sound of many bed-ward rooks bustling and croaking to their several roosts.

50, 51. Light . . . wood] MRS Kemble (Macmillan's Mag., May, 1867). We see the violet-coloured sky, we feel the soft intermitting wind of evening, we hear the solemn lullaby of the dark fir-forest, the homeward flight of the bird suggests the sweetest images of rest and peace; and, coupled and contrasting with the gradual falling of the dim veil of twilight over the placid face of nature, the remote horror of the deed of fearful note,' about to desecrate the solemn repose of the approaching night, gives to these harmonious and lovely lines a wonderful effect of mingled beauty and terror.

51. wood] KEIGHTLEY. We might add, on earth below. See Troi. and Cress., I, iii, 4.

53. agents] STEEVENS. Thus in Sydney's Astrophel and Stella: 'In night, of sprites the ghastly powers do stir.' Also in Ascham's Toxophilus [p. 52, ed. Arber]: For on the nighte tyme and in corners, Spirites and theues, &c., vse mooste styrringe, when in the daye lyght, and in open places whiche be ordeyned of God for honeste thynges, they darre not ones come; whiche thinge Euripides noteth verye well, sayenge Iph. in Taur.: Il thynges the night, good thinges the daye doth haunt and vse.'

ANONYMOUS. Sh. may mean not merely sprites or demons, but, generally, robbers, murderers, animals of prey who prowl in the night, and other noxious visitants of the dark; such, for instance, as he alludes to in Lear, III, ii, 42-45.

53. preys] ELWIN. The plural individualizes more pointedly the peculiar prey of each differing agent of evil, and so denotes every kind of prey, of every species of vicious power that darkness favours.

CLARENDON. For this use of the plural, compare III, i, 121, and V, viii, 61. 54, 55. Thou . . . ill] CLARENDON. This couplet reads like an interpolation. It interrupts the sense.

56. go] DELIUS. This can hardly mean that he asks Lady M. to leave the stage with him, but, in connection with what has preceded, it is rather a request that she should aid him, or suffer him quietly to carry out his plan. As in Lear, I, i, 107: 'But goes thy heart with this ?'

SCENE III. A park near the palace.

Enter three Murderers.

First Mur. But who did bid thee join with us?

Third Mur.

Macbeth.

Sec. Mur. He needs not our mistrust; since he delivers Our offices, and what we have to do,

Enter three Murderers] [In Notes and Queries, for 11 September and 13 November, 1869, Mr ALLAN PARK PATON broached and maintained the theory that the Third Murderer was Macbeth himself, and adduced in proof eight arguments. First: Although the banquet was to commence at seven, Macbeth did not go there till near midnight. Second: His entrance to the room and the appearance of the murderer are almost simultaneous. Third: So dear to his heart was the success of this plot, that during the four or five hours before the banquet he must have been taken up with the intended murder some way or other. He could not have gone to the feast with the barest chance of the plot miscarrying. Fourth: If there had been a third murderer sent to superintend the other two, he must have been Macbeth's chief confidant, and as such in all probability would have been the first to announce the result. Fifth: The twenty mortal murthers' was a needless and devilish kind of mutilation, not like the work of hirelings. Sixth: The third murderer repeated the precise instructions given to the other two, showed unusual intimacy with the exact locality, the habits of the visitors, &c., and seems to have struck down the light, probably to escape recognition. Seventh: There was a levity in Macbeth's manner with the murderer at the banquet, which is quite explicable if he personally knew that Banquo was dead. Eighth: When the Ghost rises, Macbeth asks those about him which of them had done it,' evidently to take suspicion off himself, and he says, in effect, to the ghost, ‘In yon black struggle you could never know me. Of course Mr Paton's theory called forth a discussion which may be found in Notes and Queries for 2 Oct., 13 Nov., and 4 Dec. 1869. In the number for 30 Oct. of the same periodical Prof. THOMAS S. BAYNES maintains that he anticipated Mr Paton. ED.]

1. But] CAPELL (p. 16). But implies a previous matter discours'd of. The third murderer appears as forward as the others, but more clever, for 'tis he who observes his comrades' mistake about the 'light.'

2. needs] ABBOTT ( 308). It is not necessary that we should mistrust him. 4. To] ABBOTT (3 187). To, even without a verb of motion, means 'motion to the side of.' Hence motion to and consequent rest near.' Hence by the side of '

་

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day:
Now spurs the lated traveller apace

To gain the timely inn, and near approaches

The subject of our watch.

Third Mur.

Hark! I hear horses.

Ban. [Within] Give us a light there, ho!
Sec. Mur.

That are within the note of expectation

Already are i' the court.

First Mur.

5

Then 'tis he: the rest

ΙΟ

His horses go about.

Third Mur. Almost a mile: but he does usually

in comparison with,' as in III, iv, 64. Hence up to,' 'in proportion to,' 'according to,' as in the present case. See note on III, i, 51 and I, ii, 10.

6. lated] ABBOTT ( 460). Prefix dropped.

7. timely] CLARENDON. Welcome, opportune. Unless, indeed, we take it as a poetical metathesis for 'to gain the inn timely, or betimes.'

7. near] COLLIER (Notes, &c.) For this the (MS) puts here in his margin. Either may be right.

SINGER (Sh. Vind.) There is not the slightest reason for deviation from the received reading.

DYCE (Few Notes, &c.) The First Murderer knew, from the coming on of night, that Banquo was not far off; but, before hearing the tread of horses and the voice of Banquo, he could not know that the victim was absolutely near at hand.

9. a light] DELIUS. Banquo calls for a light from one of his servants, because he and Fleance are about to strike off into the footway, while the servants make a cir cuit to the castle, with the horses.

10. note] STEEVENS. They who are set down in the list of guests, and expected to supper.

CLARENDON. For 'note,' in this sense, see Winter's Tale, IV, iii, 49. Also in Rom. and Jul., I, ii, 36.

II. horses] HORN (i. 81). Sh., who dared do all that poet ever dared, nevertheless did not dare to bring upon the stage-a horse. And very properly; for there, where noble poets represent the world's history upon the 'boards that imitate the world,' there—no brutes should be allowed. But in the present scene it is hard to avoid introducing a horse, and the poet has to obviate the difficulty in four almost insignificant lines, in order to account for the absence of the steeds. It is, after all, undoubtedly better not to shrink from two or three such trivial lines than to have a horse come clattering on the stage. Would that Schiller had thought of this passage and so have spared us in his noble 'Tell' that mounted Landvogt!