[MACBETH.]
ACT I.
Scene 1. Page 327.
All. Paddock calls.
Mr. Steevens has remarked that "in Shakspeare a paddock certainly means a toad." Indeed it properly does everywhere; and when applied to the frog, seems either to have been mistakenly used, or to have signified the rubeta or rana bufo, a frog of a venomous kind. The word comes to us from the Saxon Paꝺa, and a toad is still called by a similar term in most of the Teutonic languages. It may be likewise observed that witches have nothing to do with frogs, an animal always regarded as perfectly harmless, though perhaps not more so in reality than the unjustly persecuted toad.
Scene 2. Page 331.
Sold. And fortune on his damned quarrel smiling.
The old copy has quarry, which Dr. Johnson has changed to quarrel, a reading that had already been adopted by Hanmer. Chance may hereafter determine that quarry was an occasional mode of orthography, euphoniæ gratiâ, as we find perrie for perril. See Howard's Defensative against the poyson of supposed prophesies, 1583, 4to, sig. A iij. The word too which expresses a square-headed arrow and a pane of glass is written both quarry and quarrel.
Scene 2. Page 335.
Dun. Dismay'd not this
Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?