tion of victims than even those of the
Holy Office during an equal space of time. According to
Llorente (_Hist. de l'Inquisition_) from 1680 to 1781, the
latter period of its despotism (which flourished especially
under Charles II., himself, as he was convinced, a victim of
witch-malice), between 13,000 and 14,000 persons suffered by
various punishments: of which number, however, 1,578 were
burned alive.

In England, from 1603 to 1680, seventy thousand persons are said
to have been executed; and during the fifteen hundred years
elapsed since the triumph of the Christian religion, millions are
reckoned to have been sacrificed on the bloody altars of the
Christian Moloch. An entry in the minutes of the proceedings in
the Privy Council for 1608 reveals that even James's ministers
began to experience some horror of the consequences of their
instructions. And the following free testimony of one of them is
truly 'an appalling record:'--'1608.--December 1.--The Earl of
Mar declared to the council that some women were taken in
Broughton [suburban Edinburgh] as witches, and being put to an
assize and convicted, albeit they persevered constant in their
denial to the end, yet they were burned _quick_ after such a
cruel manner that some of them died in despair, renouncing and
blaspheming God; and others half-burned broke out of the fire,
and were cast _quick_ in it again till they were burned to the
death.'[135]

[135] The terrestrial and _real_ Fiends seem to have striven
to realise on earth and to emulate the 'Tartarus horrificos
eructans faucibus aestus' described by the Epicurean
philosophic poet (Lucretius, _De Rerum Natura_, iii.).

Equally monstrous and degrading were the disclosures in the
torture-chambers; and many admitted that they had had children by
the devil. The circumstances of the Sabbath, the various rites of
the compact, the forms and method of bewitching, the manner of
sexual intercourse with the demons--these were the principal
staple of the judicial examinations.

In the southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning
proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the
most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth
century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under
the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden,
founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This
persecution raged at two separate periods; fir