MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED. SHERIDAN'S PLAYS. PLAYS FROM MOLIÈRE. By English Dramatists. MARLOWE'S FAUSTUS & GOETHE'S FAUST. CHRONICLE OF THE CID. RABELAIS' GARGANTUA and the HEROIC DEFOE'S JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR. LOCKE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT & FILMER'S "PATRIARCHA." SCOTT'S DEMONOLOGY and WITCHCRAFT. ON DE MONOLOGY AND WITCHCRAFT BY SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL NEW YORK: 9 LAFAYETTE PLACE 1884 938.4488.e.1 INTRODUCTION. Sir Walter ScoTT'S "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" were his contribution to a series of books, published by John Murray, which appeared between the years 1829 and 1847, and formed a collection of eighty volumes known as "Murray's Family Library." The series was planned to secure a wide diffusion of good literature in cheap fiveshilling volumes, and Scott's "Letters," written and published in 1830, formed one of the earlier books in the collection. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in the autumn of 1826, and Charles Knight, who had then conceived a plan of a National Library, was entrusted, in July, 1827, with the superintendence of its publications. Its first treatises appeared in sixpenny numbers, once a fortnight. Its "British Almanac" and " Companion to the Almanac" first appeared at the beginning of 1829. Charles Knight started also in that year his own "Library of Entertaining Knowledge." John Murray's "Family Library" was then begun, and in the spring of 1832-the year of the Reform Bill the advance of civilization by the diffusion of good literature, through cheap journals as well as cheap books, was sought by the establishment of "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal" in the North, and in London of "The Penny Magazine." In the autumn of that year, 1832, on the 21st of September, Sir Walter Scott died. The first warning of death had come to him in February, 1830, with a stroke of apoplexy. He had been visited by an old friend who brought him memoirs of her father, which he had promised to revise for the press. He seemed for half |