Popular hatred rendered the existence of a reputed witch so miserable, that they even courted death in despair. A striking case of this sort is mentioned in Satan's Invisible World discovered, by Sinclair. Several witches were arraigned at Lander in 1649, and all condemned to the stake, except one. Before the time of execution, this woman sent for the minister and other witnesses, and made the usual confession of a covenant with the devil. Its sincerity was suspected, and she was strenuously urged to revoke it, but she persisted, and was sentenced to suffer with the rest. Being carried forth to the place of execution, she remained silent during the first, second, and third prayer, and then perceiving that there remained no more, but to rise and go to the stake, she lifted up her body, and, with a loud voice, cried out:

"Now all you that see me this day, know, that I am now to die a witch by my own confession, and I free all men, especially the ministers and magistrates, of the guilt of my blood. I take it wholly upon myself, my blood be upon my own head. And as I must make answer to the God of heaven presently, I declare I am as free of witchcraft as any child: but being delated by a malicious woman, and put in prison under the name of a witch, disowned by my husband and friends, and seeing no ground of hope of my coming out of prison, or ever coming in credit again, through the temptation of the devil, I made up that confession, on purpose to destroy my own life, being weary of it, and chusing rather to die than live."

She was then executed, amid the tears of the spectators.

A variety of circumstances deserve notice, from either serving as symptoms, or having operated as causes, of the peculiar abundance of these notions in England, during the seventeenth century. Alchymy, astrology, &c. have always had their believers and votaries; but, besides that they never excited the horror, nor occasioned the misery, which flowed from the supposed prevalence of witchcraft, they have not been affected by causes similar to those which made the latter for a time so formidable, and which were also of such a nature as to render it formidable only for a time. They have all their foundation in human nature; they appeal to the love of power, of pleasure, of knowledge, of wealth, of vengeance; they all give way, if not to the moral philosophy which teaches to regulate these passions, at least to the progress of natural philosophy, which shews them to be ineffective means for the proposed end. Their appearances are, therefore, more uniform, their course more steady, their grasp of the human mind more firm, their reception and advance, and their exposure and abandonment more gradual, than in the case before us.

The statute of the first James has been already indicated as

one cause of the offences which it denounced. At first, this tendency was increased by the manner in which it was administered. The different clauses were taken disjunctively, and it was held sufficient, if any one of the offences specified were made out to the satisfaction of the jury. Afterwards, the judges adopted a much more humane interpretation, and usually decided, that they should be taken collectively, and consequently that there could be no conviction for witchcraft, but in cases of alleged murder. They listened to the voice of humanity, pleading in the language of Bassanio:

"It must appear

That malice bears down truth. And I beseech you,
Wrest once the law to your authority;

To do a great right, do a little wrong,
And curb this cruel devil of his will."

Many causes were sent out, or kept out of court by the mercy of this legal discovery, which was probably owing to the extent to which they had multiplied, and the facility with which jurymen convicted. One of the latest convictions was that of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender before Sir Matthew Hale, at Bury, in 1664. They were executed, and died maintaining their innocence. Their execution is a foul blot upon his name, and fully justifies the remark, that "his piety and theological reading seemed only to have the effect of rendering him credulous and unrelenting." There can be little doubt of their having been the victims of imposture. Such was the opinion, publicly declared in court during the trial, of Serjeant Keeling, Lord Cornwallis, and Sir Edmund Bacon, who made some experiments, at the judge's request, on the children who pretended to be bewitched, and found that, when their eyes were covered, they played off their fits, &c. at the touch of some other person, whom they mistook for one of the accused. He charged the jury without summing the evidence, dwelling only upon the certainty of the fact, that there were witches, for which he appealed to the Scriptures, and, as he said, to“ the wisdom of all nations," and the jury having convicted, he, next morning, left them for execution.

Perhaps this trial is the only place in which we ever met with the name of Sir Thomas Brown, without pleasurable associations; yet we cannot leave it without extracting his evidence:

"There was also Dr. Brown, of Norwich, a person of great knowledge; who, after this evidence given, and upon view of the three persons in court, was desired to give his opinion, what he did conceive of them; and he was clearly of opinion, that the persons

were bewitched; and said, That in Denmark there had been lately a great discovery of witches, who used the very same way of afflicting persons, by conveying pins into them, and crooked, as these pins were, with needles and nails. And his opinion was, That the devil, in such cases, did work upon the bodies of men and women, upon a natural foundation, (that is) to stir up and excite such humours superabounding in their bodies to a great excess, whereby he did, in an extraordinary manner, afflict them with such distempers as their bodies were most subject to, as particularly appeared in these children; for he conceived, that these swouning fits were natural, and nothing else but that they call the mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the subtilty of the devil co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villanies."

For Sir Thomas Brown's speculations on the subject of witchcraft and diabolical delusions, we must content ourselves with referring our readers to Vulgar Errors, Book i. c. x. xi. ; B. v. c. xxii. 19. and B. vii. c. xii.

Very different was the conduct of Chief Justice Holt, nor are the obligations of humanity less than those of freedom to his firm, enlightened, and upright mind. Whatever truth there may be in the well-known story of his having, in a juvenile frolic, given a charm for the ague, in payment for a tavern bill which he had not the regular means of discharging, and which was afterwards produced before him in evidence against his landlady, who had been practising with it; certain it is, that his elevation was the signal for a more humane and rational procedure; eleven were tried before him, and all acquitted, notwithstanding the customary depositions were made about vomiting pins, needles, &c. devils' marks, and sucking imps. So changed were the times, that even confession failed to produce conviction, and the absurdities of a disordered imagination sunk to their real worth. His successor, Parker, put a stop to the trial by water, by his declaration, at the Essex summer assizes in 1712, that, if it occasioned the death of the suspected witch, on whom the experiment was made, all the parties concerned were guilty of wilful murder.

It seems as if the rack were occasionally employed, though we gather this from the language of the disputants, and not from any clear record of the fact, at least during the period more particularly in view, which has fallen in our way. Master Perkins, that" chosen instrument of preaching God's word," contended, that the magistrate might lawfully use it upon strong and great presumptions, and when the party was obstinate; to which Sir Robert Filmer, who was much more learned in the law, in his excellent Advertisement to Jurymen, replies, somewhat doubtfully, thus:

"Here it may be noted, that it is not lawful for any person, but

the judge only, to allow torture: suspicious neighbours may not, of their own heads, use either threats, terrors, or tortures. I know not any one of those presumptions before-cited, to be sufficient to warrant a magistrate to use torture; or whether, when the party constantly denies the fact, it must be counted obstinacy. In case of treason, sometimes, when the main fact hath been either confessed, or by some infallible proofs manifested, the magistrate, for a farther discovery of some circumstance of the time, the place, and the persons, or the like, have made use of the rack: and yet that kind of torture had not been of antient use in this kingdom; for if my memory fail not, I have read, that the rack hath been called the Duke of Exeter's daughter, and was first used about Henry the Sixth's days."

King James couples the necessity of using the rack with other symptoms of guilt, in his reply to the objection, that witchcraft was only the fancy of a melancholy mind. He denies the fact, that witches were generally melancholick:

"Whereas by the contrary, a great number of them that ever have been convict or confessours of witchcraft, as may be presently seene by many that have at this time confessed, are some of them rich and worldly wise, some of them fat and corpulent in their bodies, and most part of them altogether given over to the pleasures of the flesh, continual haunting of companie, and all kinde of merrinesse, both lawful and unlawful, which are things directly contrary to the symptomes of melancholly, whereof I spake; and further experience daily proves how loth they are to confesse without torture, which witnesseth their guiltinesse.'

It is probably Scotch experience, and not English, to which he here appeals.

The rules of evidence commonly acted upon must have rendered torture, one would suppose, very unnecessary, and conviction sufficiently easy without confession. It is laid down in Dalton's Country Justice, that

"Spectral evidence, i. e. the afflicted parties thinking they see the persons that torment them, may be given in evidence that insensible parts and teats are signs of witchcraft-that the devil's mark may be like a flea-bite-that imps may be kept in pots, or other vessels; and that the pots and places where they are kept stink detestably; and that therefore such stinking places in their houses are signs that they have imps."

One of the most infamous perversions of evidence occurred in the trial of the witches of Warbois, before Mr. Justice Fenner, at Huntington, in 1593. An old man, his wife, and daughter, were accused of bewitching the five children of a Mr. Throgmorton, several servants, the lady of Sir Samuel

Cromwell, and other persons. A confession was obtained indirectly, from the old woman, who was about fourscore years old, by persuading her to repeat a charm, in a form prescribed to her, on which the children, who were the principal witnesses, immediately came out of the fits, which, as they pretended, were occasioned by her arts. To obtain similar proof, such as it was, against the old man, the judge told him on his trial, "that if he would not speak the words of the charm, the court would hold him guilty of the crimes he was accused of." After some browbeating, he did repeat it, when the child's fit ceased, and the judge exclaimed: "You see all, she is now well, but not by the music of David's harp ;" and the poor fellow was condemned, as was his daughter upon similar evidence. Some bystanders urged the latter to plead pregnancy as a means of saving her life, or, at least, of deferring her fate. She indignantly replied," that she never would; for it should never be said, that she was both a witch and a whore." They were all executed, and their goods, which were of the value of forty pounds, being escheated to Sir S. Cromwell, as lord of the manor, he gave the amount to the mayor and aldermen of Huntingdon, for a rent-charge of forty shillings yearly, to be paid out of their town lands for an annual lecture upon the subject of witchcraft, to be preached at their town every Ladyday by a Doctor or Bachelor of Divinity, of Queen's College, Cambridge.

These perversions of evidence wrought their own cure, and thus assisted to disabuse the public mind. As their absurdity and injustice were displayed, it followed either that, if they were retained, the decisions of courts of justice would cease to be respected; or, if they were abandoned, that convictions would no longer be obtained; and, either way, one most impressive testimony to the fact of witchery was withdrawn. Even the statute of James was, at length, made to afford some protection for the poor creatures who were accused under it; for their accusers could seldom detect them without some means, which were a kind of charm, and for which they were themselves threatened with the penalties of the act.

A very large proportion of those who were condemned made ample confessions, either before or after sentence, and there is in these confessions a very striking similarity, particularly as to the ceremonies observed in making the fatal compact, which we have already given from Gaule. Their model seems to have been that of Agnes Sympson, the wise wife of Keith, made before James, in 1597, (see Glanvil, p. 399,) and from which we borrowed both the terms employed in the statute, and the description in his Demonology. Devoutly believing in all this nonsense, and talking, hearing, and dreaming of it all