s
threatened with a trial for wilful error upon an assize, and
could only escape from severe censure and punishment by pleading
guilty, and submitting themselves to the king's pleasure. The
alterations and trenching,' adds Scott, 'which lately took place
on the Castle-hill at Edinburgh for the purpose of forming the
new approach to the city from the west, displayed the ashes of
the numbers who had perished in this manner, of whom a large
proportion must have been executed between 1590--when the great
discovery was made concerning Euphane MacCalzean and the wise
wife of Keith and their accomplices--and the union of the
crowns.'[132]

[132] Sir W. Scott's _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_,
ix.

Euphane's exceptional doom was 'to be bound to the stake, and
burned in ashes _quick_ to the death.' 'Burning quick' was not an
uncommon sentence: if the less cruel one of hanging or strangling
first and afterwards burning was more usual. Thirty warlocks and
witches was the total number executed on June 25th, 1591. A few,
like Dr. Cunninghame, may have been really experienced in the use
of poison and poisonous drugs. The art of poisoning has been
practised perhaps almost as extensively as (often coextensively
with) that of sorcery; a tremendous and mostly inscrutable crime
which science, in all ages, has been able more surely to conceal
than to detect.

Two facts eminently illustrate the barbarous iniquity of the
Courts of Justice when dealing with their witch prisoners. An
expressed malediction, or frequently an almost inaudible mutter,
followed by the coincident fulfilment of the imprecation, was
accepted eagerly by the judges as sufficient proof (an antecedent
one, contrary to the boasted principle of English law at least,
which assumes the innocence until the guilt has been proved, of
the accused) of the crime of the person arraigned. And they
complacently attributed to conscious guilt the ravings produced
by an excruciating torture--that equally inhuman and irrational
invention of judicial cruelty; confidently boasting that they
were careful to sentence no person without previous confession
duly made.

But these confessions not seldom were partly extracted from a
natural wish to be freed from the persecution of neighbours as
well as from present bodily torture. Sir George Mackenzie, Lord
Advocate of Scotland during the period of the greatest fury, and
himself president at many of the trials, a believer, among