even though they had done no injury to other people, and were simply unfortunate enough to have made compacts with the demon for the attainment of some purely personal advantages. For example, in 1689, there occurred the famous case of a youth, named Richard Dugdale, who sacrificed himself to the devil, on condition of being made the best dancer in Lancashire. The dissenting clergy took this youth under their charge, and a committee of them fasted and prayed, publicly and almost incessantly, for a whole year, in order to expel the dancing demon. The idea of this impostor leaping for a twelvemonth, and playing fantastic tricks before these grave divines, is extremely ludicrous. But the divines played tricks not less fantastic. They became so contemptuously intimate with the demon as to mock him on account of saltatory deficiencies. A portion of their addresses to him on this score has been preserved, but of too ridiculous a nature for quotation in these pages. If anything else than a mere impostor, it is probable that Dugdale was affected with St Vitus's Dance; and this is the more likely, as it was after all a regular physician who brought his dancing to a close. But the divines took care to claim the merit of the cure.

After the time of Holt, the ministers of the law went a step farther in their course of improvement, and spared the accused in spite of condemnatory verdicts. In 1711, Chief-justice Powell presided at a trial where an old woman was pronounced guilty. The judge, who had sneered openly at the whole proceedings, asked the jury if they found the woman 'guilty upon the indictment of conversing with the devil in the shape of a cat.' The reply was: 'We do find her guilty of that;' but the question of the judge produced its intended effect in casting ridicule on the whole charge, and the woman was pardoned. An able writer in the Foreign Quarterly Review remarks, after noticing this case: 'Yet, frightful to think, after all this, in 1716, Mrs Hicks and her daughter, aged nine, were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings, and making a lather of soap! With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of murders in England closes.' And a long and a black catalogue it was. 'Barrington, in his observations on the statute of Henry VI., does not hesitate to estimate the numbers of those put to death in England on this charge at THIRTY THOUSAND !'

Notwithstanding that condemnations were no longer obtainable after 1716, popular outrages on supposed witches continued to take place in England for many years afterwards. On an occasion of this kind, an aged female pauper was killed by a mob near Tring, in Staffordshire; and for the murder, one of the perpetrators was tried and executed. The occurrence of such outrages having been traced to the unrepealed statute of James I. against witchcraft, an act was passed, in 1736 (10th George II. cap. 55), discharging all legal proceedings on the ground of sorcery or witchcraft; and since

this period, prosecutions for following hidden arts have had no higher aim than the punishing of a pretended skill in fortunetelling and other forms of practical knavery.

It has been said that James I. brought with him from Scotland strong impressions on the subject of witchcraft, and, accordingly, we now refer to the history of the delusion in that country. In the reign of Queen Mary, the contemporary of Elizabeth, the public mind in Scotland fell into the common frenzy, and an act was passed by the Scottish parliament for the suppression and punishment of witchcraft. In virtue of this law, great numbers were tried and executed. At this time, and subsequently, the Scottish witches were nearly all aged women; only a few men figured in the prosecutions. On coming to exercise the functions of majesty, James made numerous judicial investigations into alleged cases of witchcraft, and derived a pleasure in questioning old women respecting their dealings with Satan. The depositions made at these formal inquests are still preserved, and are among the most curious memorials of the sixteenth century.

The witch mania in Scotland was, through these prosecutions, brought to an extravagant height in the year 1591, when a large number of unhappy beings were cruelly burned to death on the Castle-hill of Edinburgh. About this period, some cases occurred to shew that witchcraft was an art not confined to the vulgar. A woman of high rank and family, Catherine Ross, Lady Fowlis, was indicted at the instance of the king's advocate for the practice of witchcraft. On inquiry, it was clearly proved that this lady had endeavoured, by the aid of witchcraft and poisons, to take away the lives of three or more persons who stood between her and an object she had at heart. She was desirous to make young Lady Fowlis possessor of the property of Fowlis, and to marry her to the Laird of Balnagown. Before this could be effected, Lady Fowlis had to cut off her sons-in-law, Robert and Hector Munro, and the young wife of Balnagown, besides several others. Having consulted with witches, Lady Fowlis began her work by getting pictures of the intended victims made in clay, which she hung up, and shot at with arrows shod with flints of a particular kind, called elf arrow-heads. No effect being thus produced, this really abandoned woman took to poisoning ale and dishes, none of which cut off the proper persons, though others, who accidentally tasted them, lost their lives. By the confession of some of the assistant hags, the purposes of Lady Fowlis were discovered, and she was brought to trial; but a local or provincial jury of dependants acquitted her. One of her purposed victims, Hector Munro, was then tried in turn for conspiring with witches against the life of his brother George. It was proved that a curious ceremony had been practised to effect this end. Hector, being sick, was carried abroad in blankets, and laid in an open grave, on which his foster-mother ran the breadth of

nine rigs, and, returning, was asked by the chief attendant witch which she chose should live, Hector or George. She answered: 'Hector.' George Munro did die soon afterwards, and Hector recovered. The latter was also acquitted, by a provincial jury, on his trial.

These disgraceful proceedings were not without their parallel in other families of note of the day. Euphemia Macalzean, daughter of an eminent judge, Lord Cliftonhall, was burned at the stake in 1591, having been convicted, if not of witchcraft, at least of a long career of intercourse with pretenders to witchcraft, whom she employed to remove obnoxious persons out of her way-tasks which they accomplished by the very simple means of poisoning, where they did accomplish them at all. The jury found this violent and abandoned woman, for such she certainly was, guilty of participation in the murder of her own godfather, of her husband's nephew, and another individual. They also found her guilty of having been at the Wise Woman of Keith's great witch-convention of North Berwick; but every witch of the day was compelled to admit having been there, out of compliment to the king, to whom it was a source of agreeable terror to think himself of so much importance as to call for a solemn convocation of the powers of evil to overthrow him. Euphemia Macalzean was 'burnt in ashes, quick, to the death.' This was a doom not assigned to the less guilty. Alluding to cases of this latter class, a writer (already quoted) in the Foreign Quarterly Review remarks: In the trials of Bessie Roy, of James Reid, of Patrick Currie, of Isobel Grierson, and of Grizel Gardiner, the charges are principally of taking off and laying on diseases either on men or cattle; meetings with the devil in various shapes and places; raising and dismembering dead bodies for the purpose of enchantments; destroying crops; scaring honest persons in the. shape of cats; taking away women's milk; committing housebreaking and theft by means of enchantments; and so on. running water, salt, rowan-tree, enchanted flints (probably elf arrowheads), and doggerel verses, generally a translation of the Creed or Lord's Prayer, were the means employed for effecting a cure.' Diseases, again, were laid on by forming pictures of clay or wax; by placing a dead hand, or some mutilated member, in the house of the intended victim; or by throwing enchanted articles at his door. A good purpose did not save the witch; intercourse with spirits in any shape being the crime.

South

Of course, in the revelations of the various witches, inconsistencies were abundant, and even plain and evident impossibilities were frequently among the things averred. The sapient James, however, in place of being led by these things to doubt the whole, was only strengthened in his opinions, it being a maxim of his that the witches were all extreme lyars.' Other persons came to different conclusions from the same premises; and before the close of James's

reign, many men of sense began to weary of the torturings and burnings that took place almost every day, in town or country, and had done so for a period of thirty years (between 1590 and 1620). Advocates now came forward to defend the accused, and in their pleadings ventured even to arraign some of the received axioms of Dæmonologie' laid down by the king himself, in a book bearing that name. The removal of James to England moderated, but did not altogether stop, the witch prosecutions. After his death they slackened more considerably. Only eight witchcraft cases are on the record as having occurred between 1625 and 1640 in Scotland, and in one of these cases, remarkable to tell, the accused escaped. The mania, as it appears, was beginning to wear itself out.

As the spirit of puritanism gained strength, however, which it gradually did during the latter part of the reign of Charles I., the partially cleared horizon became again overcast; and again was this owing to ill-judged edicts, which, by indicating the belief of the great and the educated in witchcraft, had the natural effect of reviving the frenzy among the flexible populace. The General Assembly was the body in fault on this occasion, and thenceforward the clergy were the great witch-hunters in Scotland. The Assembly passed condemnatory acts in 1640, '43, '44, '45, and '49; and with every successive act, the cases and convictions increased, with even a deeper degree of attendant horrors than at any previous time. 'The old impossible and abominable fancies,' says the Review formerly quoted, ‘of the Malleus were revived. About thirty trials appear on the record between 1649 and the Restoration, only one of which seems to have terminated in an acquittal; while at a single circuit, held at Glasgow, Stirling, and Ayr, in 1659, seventeen persons were convicted and burnt for this crime.' But it must be remembered that the phrase, 'on the record,' alludes only to justiciary trials, which formed but a small proportion of the cases really tried. The justiciary lists take no note of the commissions perpetually given by the Privy-council to resident gentlemen and clergymen to try and burn witches in their respective districts. These commissions executed people over the whole country in multitudes. Wodrow, Lamont, Mercer, and Whitelocke prove this but too satisfactorily.

The clergy continued, after the Restoration, to pursue these imaginary criminals with a zeal altogether deplorable. The Justiciary Court condemned twenty persons in the first year of Charles II.'s reign (1661), and in one day of the same year the council issued fourteen new provincial commissions, the aggregate doings of which one shudders to guess at. To compute their condemnations would be impossible, for victim after victim perished at the stake, unnamed and unheard of. Morayshire became at this particular period the scene of a violent fit of the great moral frenzy, and some of the most remarkable examinations, signalising the whole course of Scottish witchcraft, took place in that county. The details, though

occasionally ludicrous from their absurdity, are too horrible for narration in the present pages.

6

On the new government becoming thoroughly fixed in power, this form of religious persecution-for in some degree such it wasabated. From 1662, there is an interval of six years without a single Justiciary trial for the crime of witchcraft, and one fellow was actually whipped for charging some person with it. After this period, the dying embers of the delusion only burst out on occasions, here and there, into a momentary flame. In 1678, several women were condemned, on their own confession,' says the Register; but we suspect this only means, in reality, that one malicious being made voluntary admissions involving others, as must often have been the case, we fear, in these proceedings. Scattered cases took place near the beginning of the eighteenth century-such as those at Paisley in 1697, at Pittenweem in 1704, and at Spott about the same time. It is curious, that as something like direct evidence became necessary for condemnation, evidence did present itself, and in the shape of possessed or enchanted young persons, who were brought into court to play off their tricks. The most striking case of this nature was that of Christian Shaw, a girl about eleven years old, and the daughter of Mr Shaw of Bargarran, in Renfrewshire. This wretched girl, who seems to have been an accomplished hypocrite, young as she was, quarrelled with a maid-servant, and, to be revenged, fell into convulsions, saw spirits, and, in short, feigned herself bewitched. To sustain her story, she accused one person after another, till not less than twenty were implicated, some of them children of the ages of twelve and fourteen! They were tried on the evidence of the girl, and five human beings perished through her malicious impostures. It is remarkable that this very girl after

From a

wards founded the thread manufacture in Renfrewshire. friend who had been in Holland, she learned some secrets in spinning, and, putting them skilfully in practice, she led the way to the extensive operations carried on of late years in that department. She became the wife of the minister of Kilmaurs, and, it is to be hoped, had leisure and grace to repent of the wicked misapplication in her youth of those talents which she undoubtedly possessed.

The last Justiciary trial for witchcraft in Scotland was in the case of Elspeth Rule, who was convicted in 1708, and banished. A belief in the crime was evidently expiring in the minds of the Scottish law authorities; and the Lord Advocate, or public prosecutor, endeavoured to prevent the county courts from taking cognisance of the subject. Notwithstanding his remonstrances, however, a case of trial and execution for witchcraft was conducted by Captain David Ross of Littledean, sheriff-depute of Sutherlandshire, in 1722. 'The victim,' observes Sir Walter Scott, in his Letters on Demonology, was an insane old woman belonging to the parish of Loth, who had so little idea of her situation as to rejoice at the sight of the fire