e cause of
her betrayal. On one occasion, in a moment of remissness, she
forgot her prayers and the sign of the cross, before retiring for
the night. No longer excluded, the fiend, assuming human shape,
effected his purpose. In due time a son was born, whose
parentage was sufficiently evinced by an entire covering of black
hair, although his limbs were well-formed, and his features fine.
Fortunately, the careless guardian had exactly calculated the
moment of the demon's birth; and no sooner was he informed of the
event, than the new-born infant was borne off to the regenerating
water, when he was christened by the name of Merlin; the fond
hopes of the demons being for this time, at least, irretrievably
disappointed. How Merlin, by superhuman prowess and knowledge,
defeated the Saracens (Saxons) in many bloody battles; his
magical achievements and favour at the court of King Vortigern
and his successors, are fully exhibited by the author of the
history.[86] Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts them as matters of
fact; and they are repeated by Vergil in the History of Britain,
composed under the auspices of Henry VIII.

[86] See _Early English Metrical Romances_, ed. by Sir H.
Ellis.

By the ancients, whole peoples were sometimes said to be derived
from these unholy connections. Jornandes, the historian of the
Goths, is glad to be able to relate their hated rivals, the Huns
(of whom the Kalmuck Tartars are commonly said to be the modern
representatives), to have owed their origin to an intercourse of
the Scythian witches with infernal spirits. The extraordinary
form and features of those dreaded emigrants from the steppes of
Tartary, had suggested to the fear and hatred of their European
subjects, a fable which Gibbon supposes might have been derived
from a more pleasing one of the Greeks.[87]

[87] A sufficiently large collection from ancient and modern
writers of the facts of _inhuman_ connections may be seen in
the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, part iii. sect. 2. Having
repeated the assertions of previous authors proving the fact
of intercourses of human with inferior species of animals,
Burton fortifies his own opinion of their reality by
numerous authorities. If those stories be true, he reasons,
that are written of Incubus and Succubus, of nymphs,
lascivious fauns, satyrs, and those heathen gods which were
devils, those lascivious Telchines of whom the Platonists
tell so many fables; or those fa