advised to assume the body of a handsome
cutpurse that morning hung at Tyburn.

[Footnote 1: Daemonologie, p. 56.]

But the theory, though ingenious, was insufficient. The devil would
occasionally appear in the likeness of a living person; and how could
that be accounted for? Again, an evil spirit, with all his ingenuity,
would find it hard to discover the dead body of a griffin, or a harpy,
or of such eccentricity as was affected by the before-mentioned Balam;
and these and other similar forms were commonly favoured by the
inhabitants of the nether world.

47. The second theory, therefore, became the more popular amongst the
learned, because it left no one point unexplained. The divines held that
although the power of the Creator had in no wise been delegated to the
devil, yet he was, in the course of providence, permitted to exercise a
certain supernatural influence over the minds of men, whereby he could
persuade them that they really saw a form that had no material objective
existence.[1] Here was a position incontrovertible, not on account of
the arguments by which it could be supported, but because it was
impossible to reason against it; and it slowly, but surely, took hold
upon the popular mind. Indeed, the elimination of the diabolic factor
leaves the modern sceptical belief that such apparitions are nothing
more than the result of disease, physical or mental.

[Footnote 1: Dialogicall Discourses, by Deacon and Walker, 4th Dialogue.
Bullinger, p. 361. Parker Society.]

48. But the semi-sceptical state of thought was in Shakspere's time
making its way only amongst the more educated portion of the nation. The
masses still clung to the old and venerated, if not venerable, belief
that devils could at any moment assume what form soever they might
please--not troubling themselves further to inquire into the method of
the operation. They could appear in the likeness of an ordinary human
being, as Harpax[1] and Mephistopheles[2] do, creating thereby the most
embarrassing complications in questions of identity; and if this belief
is borne in mind, the charge of being a devil, so freely made, in the
times of which we write, and before alluded to, against persons who
performed extraordinary feats of valour, or behaved in a manner
discreditable and deserving of general reprobation, loses much of its
barbarous grotesqueness. There was no doubt as to Coriolanus,[3] as has
been said; nor Shylock.[4] Even "the outward sain