A second class, who came nearer to the exact idea of being possessed by devils, were persons who were deranged, and entertained something of that impression themselves, and avowed it. I am not speaking of single instances, but of an extensive popular delusion, or frenzy rather, which prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in parts of Europe as an epidemic seizure. It was called the wolf-sickness. Those affected betook themselves to the forests as wild beasts. One of these, who was brought before De Lancre, at Bordeaux, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a young man of Besançon. He avowed himself to be huntsman of the forest lord, his invisible master. He believed that, through the power of his master, he had been transformed into a wolf; that he hunted in the forest as such; and that he was often accompanied by a bigger wolf, whom he suspected to be the master he served; with more details of the same kind. The persons thus affected were called Wehrwolves. Their common fate was the alternative of recovering from their derangement, under the influence of exorcism and its accessories, or of being executed.

The third and proper type of possession by devils presented more complicated features. The patient's state was not uniform. Often, or for the most part, his appearance and behaviour were natural; then paroxysms would supervene, in which he appeared fierce, malignant, demoniacal, in which he believed himself to be possessed, and acted up to the character, and in which powers, seemingly superhuman, such as reading the thoughts of others, were manifested by the possessed. The explanation of these features is happily given by Dr Fischer of Basle, author of an excellent work on Somnambulism. He resolves them, with evident justice, into recurrent fits of trance—the patient, when entranced, being at the same

time deranged; and he exemplifies his hypothesis by the case of a German lady who had fits of trance, in which she fancied herself a French emigrée: it would have been as easy for her, had it been the mode, to have fancied herself, and to have played the part of being, possessed by the fiend. The case is this:

:

Gmelin, in the first volume of his Contributions to Anthropology, narrates that, in the year 1789, a German lady, under his observation, had daily paroxysms, in which she believed herself to be, and acted the part of, a French emigrant. She had been in distress of mind through the absence of a person she was attached to, and he was somehow implicated in the scenes of the French Revolution. After an attack of fever and delirium, the complaint regulated itself, and took the form of a daily fit of trance-waking. When the time for the fit approached, she stopped in her conversation, and ceased to answer when spoken to; she then remained a few minutes sitting perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the carpet before her. Then, in evident uneasiness, she began to move her head backwards and forwards, to sigh and to pass her fingers across her eyebrows. This lasted a minute; then she raised her eyes, looked once or twice round with timidity and embarrassment, then began to talk in French, when she would describe all the particulars of her escape from France, and, assuming the manner of a Frenchwoman, talk purer and better accented French than she had been known to be capable of talking before, correct her friends when they spoke incorrectly, but delicately, and with a comment on the German rudeness of laughing at the bad pronunciation of strangers: and if led herself to speak or read German, she used a French accent, and spoke it ill; and the

like.

We have by this time had intercourse enough with

spirits and demons to prepare us for the final subject of witchcraft.

The superstition of witchcraft stretches back into remote antiquity, and has many roots. In Europe it is partly of Druidical origin. The Druidesses were part priestesses, part shrewd old ladies, who dealt in magic and medicine. They were called allrune, all-knowing. There was some touch of classical superstition mingled in the stream which was flowing down to us; so an edict of a Council of Trêves, in the year 1310, has this injunction:-"Nulla mulierum se nocturnis horis equitare cum Dianâ profiteatur; hæc enim dæmoniaca est illusio." But the main source from which we derived this superstition is the East, and traditions and facts incorporated in our religion. There were only wanted the ferment of thought of the fifteenth century, the energy, ignorance, enthusiasm, and faith of those days, and the papal denunciation of witchcraft by the Bull of Innocent the Eighth, in 1459, to give fury to the delusion. And from this time, for three centuries, the flames at which more than a hundred thousand victims perished cast a lurid light over Europe.

But the fires are out-the superstition is extinct-and its history is trite, and has lost all interest; so I will hasten to the one point in it which deserves, which indeed requires, explanation.

I do not advert to the late duration of the belief in witchcraft-so late, that it is but a century this very month of January since the last witch, a lady and a subprioress, whose confession I will afterwards give, was executed in Germany; while, at the same period, a strong effort was made in Scotland, by good and conscientious, and otherwise sensible persons, to reanimate the embers of the delusion, as is shown by the following evidence. In February 1743, the Associate Presbytery, meaning

the Presbytery of the Secession or Seceders, (from the Scottish Established Church,) passed, and soon thereafter published, an act for renewing the National Covenant, in which there is a solemn acknowledgment of sins, and vow to renounce them; among which sins is specified "the repeal of the penal statutes against witchcraft, contrary to the express laws of God, and for which a holy God may be provoked, in a way of righteous judgment, to leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and more, and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce others to the same wicked and dangerous snare."-(Note, Edinburgh Review, January 1847.)

Nor is the marvel in the absolute belief of the people in witchcraft only two centuries ago: what could they do but believe, when the witches and sorcerers themselves, before their execution, often avowed their guilt, and told how they had laid themselves out to league with the evil spirit; how they had gone through a regular process of initiation in the black art; how they had been rebaptised with the support of regular witch-sponsors; how they had abjured Christ, and had entered, to the best of their belief, into a compact with the Devil, and had commenced accordingly a suitable course of bad works, poisoning and bewitching men and cattle, and the like?

Nor is the wonder in the unfairness with which those accused of witchcraft were treated. So at Lindheim, Horst reports on one occasion six women were implicated in a charge of having disinterred the body of a child to make a witchbroth. As they happened to be innocent of the deed, they underwent the most cruel tortures before they would confess it. At length they saw their cheapest bargain was to admit the crime, and be simply burned alive, and have it over. They did so. But the husband of one of them procured an official examination of the grave, when the child's body was found in its coffin

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safe and sound. What said the Inquisitor? "This is indeed a proper piece of devil's work: no, no, I am not to be taken in by such a gross and obvious imposture. Luckily the women have already confessed the crime, and burned they must and shall be, in honour of the Holy Trinity, which has commanded the extirpation of sorcerers and witches." The six women were burned alive accordingly; for the people had fits of frenzied terror, which required to be allayed by the sacrifice of a victim or two, and Justice became confused: to be sure, in those days her head was never very clear, and threw by mistake the odium of the crime into the accusing scale; the other flew up significantly of the full extent to which mercy could interfere to temper the law. curious instance of an epidemic attack of the belief in witchcraft occurred at Salzburg between the years 1627 and 1629, originating in a sickness among the cattle in the neighbourhood. The sickness was unluckily attributed to witchcraft, and an active inquiry was set on foot to detect the participators in the crime. It was very successful; for we find in the list of persons burned alive on this occasion, besides children of 14, 12, 11, 10, 9 years of age, fourteen canons, four gentlemen of the choir, two young men of rank, a fat old lady of rank, the wife of a burgomaster, a counsellor, the fattest burgess of Würtzburg, together with his wife, the handsomest woman in the city, and a midwife of the name of Shiekelte, with whom (according to a N. B. in the original report) the whole of the mischief originated.

The marvel in witchcraft is the belief entertained by the sorcerers and witches themselves of its reality. That many of these persons, shrewd and unprincipled, should have pretended an implicit belief in their art, till they were brought to justice, is only what is still occasionally done in modern times. But that they should, as it is