th, and confirmed moreover by the confessions of the
accused parties themselves, and that, Sire, with so much
agreement and conformity between the different cases, that
the most ignorant persons convicted of this crime have
spoken to the same circumstances and in nearly the same
words as the most celebrated authors who have written about
it; all of which may be easily proved to your Majesty's
satisfaction by the records of various trials before your
parliaments.'--Given in _Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular
Delusions_. Louis XIV., with an unaccustomed care for human
life, resisting these forcible arguments, remained firm, and
the condemned were saved from the stake.

While most of the Governments of Europe were now content to leave
sorcerers and witches to the irregular persecutions of the
people, tacitly abandoning to the mob the right of proceeding
against them as they pleased, without the interference of the
law, in a remote kingdom of Europe a witch-persecution commenced
with the ordinary fury, under express sanction of the Government.
It is curious that at the last moments of its existence as a
legal crime, one of the last fires of witchcraft should have been
lighted in Sweden, a country which, remote from continental
Europe, seems to have been up to that period exempt from the
judicial excesses of England, France, or Germany. The story of
the Mohra witches is inserted in an appendix to Glanvil's
'Collection of Relations,' by Dr. Anthony Horneck. The epidemic
broke out in 1669, in the village of Mohra, in the mountainous
districts of Central Sweden. A number of children became
affected with an imaginative or mischievous disease, which
carried them off to a place called Blockula, where they held
communion and festival with the devil. These, numbering a large
proportion of the youth of the neighbourhood, were incited, it
seems, by the imposture or credulity of the ministers of Mohra
and Elfdale, to report the various transactions at their
spiritual _seances_. To such a height increased the terrified
excitement of the people, that a commission was appointed by the
king, consisting of both clergy and laity, to enquire into the
origin and circumstances of the matter. It commenced proceedings
in August 1670. Days for humiliation and prayer were ordered, and
a solemn service inaugurated the judicial examinations. Agreeably
to the dogma of the most approved foreign authorities, which
allowed the ev