In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare brings the witches and their mistress Hecate together. The stage direction, "Enter Hecate to the other three witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon in her baleful and haunting phase. But on this Northern heath she displays a genuine Celtic temper, and scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings with Macbeth; while she, "the close contriver of all harms," was never called to bear her part. Of course not, as Macbeth's imagination had no personal _rapport_ with her; and all that Shakspeare wants of her is to keep the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to creating "artificial sprites" in collusion with the greater incantation in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide him nothing but the cave and the cauldron. The scene never rises into dignity until he arrives. Three old women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of nauseous curiosities which they have got by foraging in disreputable quarters: they stir the slab gruel to verses which are as realistic as a wooden spoon; yet neither Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's contemporaries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. But mark how the tone alters when Macbeth comes to conjure with them. What is it they do? "A deed without a name." Then there is only one more culinary interruption; but we shudder and cannot sneer, for it uses an ingredient furnished by a man who has committed crimes against nature: the spell catches the drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's secret divinings of the future fill the scene: the visions incorporate his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise the armed head, the bloody child. He reassures himself with the phantom of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and misinterprets it into a "sweet bodement" of safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber: that spirit sits at every feast of solace which the King partakes. His heart "throbs to know one thing:" Will Banquo's issue ever reign? The King's flaming soul throws shadows on the screen of his dread,--a show of kings, Banquo first and last, eight of them between Banquo blood-bolter'd and Banquo crowned. But the Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood let it be, then. "From this moment, The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand."