noble of the court, and went clad in gold
and silver; his wife vied with noble dames in the richness of her array.
The children of those convicted and punished were sent into exile; their
goods were confiscated; plowman and vintner failed." (_The Witch
Persecutions_, pp. 13-14, BURR.)

Fanaticism did not rule and ruin without hindrance and remonstrance. Men
of great learning and exalted position struck mighty blows at the root
of the evil. They could not turn the tide but they stemmed it, and their
attacks upon the whole theory of Satanic power and the methods of
persecution were potent in the reaction to humanity and a reign of
reason.

Always to be remembered among these men of power are Johann Wier,
Friedrich Spee, and notably Reginald Scot, who in his _Discovery of
Witchcraft_, in 1584, undertook to prove that "the contracts and
compacts of witches with devils and all infernal spirits and familiars,
are but erroneous novelties and erroneous conceptions."

"After all it is setting a high value on our conjectures to roast a man
alive on account of them." (MONTAIGNE.)

Who may measure in romance and the drama the presence, the cogent and
undeniable power of those same abiding elements of mysticism and
mystery, which underlie all human experience, and repeated in myriad
forms find their classic expression in the queries of the "Weird
Sisters," "_those elemental avengers without sex or kin_"?

"When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?
When the hurly burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won."

Are not the mummeries of the witches about the cauldron in Macbeth, and
Talbot's threat pour la Pucelle,

"Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch,"

uttered so long ago, echoed in the wailing cry of La Meffraye in the
forests of Machecoul, in the maledictions of Grio, and of the Saga of
the Burning Fields?

Their vitality is also clearly shown in their constant use and
exemplification by the romance and novel writers who appeal with
certainty and success to the popular taste in the tales of spectral
terrors. Witness: Farjeon's _The Turn of the Screw_; Bierce's _The
Damned Thing_; Bulwer's _A Strange Story_; Cranford's _Witch of Prague_;
Howells' _The Shadow of a Dream_; Winthrop's _Cecil Dreeme_; Grusot's
_Night Side of Nature_; Crockett's Black Douglas; and _The Red Axe_,
Francis' _Lychgate Hall_; Caine's _The Shadow of a Crime_; and countless
other stories, traditions, tales