magic instrument, resembling the modern psychograph, and succeeded in deciphering the letters Theod. Their discovery became known to the jealous emperor, who ordered not only Theodorus, his second secretary of state, to be executed, but with him a large number of eminent personages whose names began with the ominous five letters. For some unknown reasons, Theodosius, then in Spain, escaped his suspicions, and yet it was he, who, when Valens fell in the war against the Goths, was summoned home by the next emperor, Gratianus, to save the empire and assume the supreme command of the army. When the successful general returned to Byzantium to make his report to the emperor, he had himself a dream in which he saw the great Patriarch of Antioch, Meletius, invest him with the purple, and place the imperial crown upon his head. Gratianus, struck by the brilliancy of the victory obtained at the moment of supreme danger, made Theodosius Emperor of the East, and returned to Rome. During the following year (380) a great council was held in Constantinople, and here, amid a crowd of assembled dignitaries of the church, Theodosius instantly recognized the Bishop of Antioch, whom he had never seen except in his dream. It is not generally known that the prediction of future greatness which Shakespeare causes the three witches to convey to Macbeth, rests on an historic basis. The announcement came to him, however, probably not at an actual meeting, but by means of a prophetic dream, which presented to the ambitious chieftain the appearance of an encounter with unearthly agents. This presumption is strengthened by the first notice of the mysterious event, which occurs, it is believed, in "Wyntownis Cronykil," where Macbeth is reported to have had a vivid dream of three weird women, who foretold him his fate. Boethius derived his information from this source, and for unknown reasons added not only Banquo as a witness of the scene, but described it, also, first of all chroniclers, as an actual meeting in a forest.