d to have been exhibited was simulated to promote his
pretensions to the especial hostility of Satan, is probable: but
that also he was impressed, in some degree, with a real and
lively fear scarcely admits of doubt. The modern Solomon might
well have blushed at the superior common sense of a barbaric
chief; and the 'judges of the seventeenth century might have been
instructed and confounded at the superior wisdom of Rotharis
[a Lombardic prince], who derides the absurd superstition and
protects the wretched victims of popular or judicial cruelty.'[118]

[118] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, xlv. It would
have been well for his subjects if he could have
congratulated himself, like Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (the
model of philosophic princes, and a more practically
virtuous, if not wiser, philosopher than the proverbial
Solomon, and of whom Niebuhr, _History of Rome_, v.,
asserts, 'If there is any sublime human virtue, it is his'),
that he had learnt from his instructors to laugh at the
bugbears of witches and demons.--[Greek: Ta eis
heauton.]--_The Meditations of M. A. Antoninus._

Previously to the 'Witch Act,' the charge of sorcery was, in most
cases, a subordinate and subsidiary one, attached to various
political or other indictments. Henceforward the practice of the
peculiar offence might be entirely independent of any more
substantial accusation. In England, compared with the other
countries of Europe, folly more than ferocity, perhaps, generally
characterises the proceedings of the tribunals. During the
pre-Reformation ages, France, even more than her island
neighbour, suffered from the crime. The fates of the Templars, of
Jeanne d'Arc, of Arras, of those suspected of causing the mad
king's, Charles VI., derangement (when many of the _white_
witches, or wizards, 'mischievously good,' suffered for failing,
by a pretended skill, to effect his promised cure) are some of
the more conspicuous examples. But in France, as in the rest of
Europe, it was in the post-feudal period that prosecutions became
of almost daily occurrence.

A prevalent kind of sorcery was that of lycanthropy, as it was
called, a prejudice derived, it seems, in part from the
Pythagorean metempsychosis. A few cases will illustrate the
nature of this stupendous transformation. That it is mostly
found to take place in France and in the southern districts, the
country of wolves, that still make their ravages there, is a