let us examine the tragedy for traces of his hand and of another. And first let the reader turn to Scene 5 of Act III., which consists almost entirely of a long speech by Hecate, beginning: Have I not reason, beldames as you are, Saucy, and overbold? How did you dare To trade and traffic with Macbeth In riddles and affairs of death: And I, the mistress of your charms, The close contriver of all harms, Was never called to bear my part, Or show the glory of our art? This speech is surely not of Shakespeare's writing. Its being in octosyllabic rhyme is not against it, however; although he abandoned rhyme almost altogether at or before this period. The fact of the business of the scene being supernatural would account for its form. But it is mere rhyme; little more than an unmeaning jingle of verses. Any journeyman at versemaking would write such stuff. Read the speech through, and then think of the writer of "Hamlet," and "Lear," and "Othello," producing such a weak wash of words at the same time when he was writing those tragedies. And even turn back and compare it with the rhyming speeches of his other supernatural personages, of Puck and Titana and Oberon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which he wrote at least ten or twelve years earlier, and you will see that it is not only so inferior, but so unlike his undoubted work that it must be rejected. Turn next to Scene 3 of Act II., and read the speeches of the Porter. Long ago Coleridge said of these, "This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterward I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand." That they were written for the mob is nothing against them as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare wrote for the mob. He made a point of putting in something for the groundlings[I] in every play that he wrote. But with what a mighty hand he did it! so that those who have since then sat in the highest seats in the world's theatre have laughed, and pondered as they laughed. "Lear" is notably free from this element; but even in the philosophical "Hamlet" we have the much elaborated scene of the Gravediggers, which was written only to please Coleridge's "mob."[J] But let the reader now compare these Porter's speeches in "Macbeth" with those of the Gravediggers in "Hamlet," and if he is one who can hope to appreciate Shakespeare at all, he will at this stage of his study see at once that although both are low-comedy, technically speaking, the former are low-lived, mean, thoughtless, without any other significance than that of the surface meaning of the poor, gross language in which they are written; while the latter, although, far more laughable even to the most uncultivated hearer, are pregnant with thought and suggestion. There can be no question that these speeches in "Macbeth" were written by some other hand than Shakespeare's.