he materials it may furnish may be
inestimable,--we might otherwise be tempted to wish that the miserable
record in which the excesses occasioned by the witch mania are
narrated, could be struck out of its pages, and for ever cancelled.
Most assuredly, he, who is content to take the fine exaggeration of
the author of _Hydriotaphia_ as a serious and literal truth, and who
believes with him that "man is a glorious animal," must not go to the
chapter which contains that record for his evidences and proofs. If he
should be in search of materials for humiliation and abasement, he
will find in the history of witchcraft in this country, from the
beginning to the end of the seventeenth century, large and abundant
materials, whether it affects the species or the individual. In truth,
human nature is never seen in worse colours than in that dark and
dismal review. Childhood, without any of its engaging properties,
appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of
a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine
adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and
man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless
destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and
superstition and only strong in oppression. If we turn from the common
herd to the luminaries of the age, to those whose works are the
landmarks of literature and science, the reference is equally
disappointing;--

"The sun itself is dark
And silent as the moon
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."

[Footnote 1: Take, as an instance, the children of Mr. Throgmorton, of
Warbois, for bewitching whom, Mother Samuels, her husband, and
daughter, suffered in 1593. No veteran professors "in the art of
ingeniously tormenting" could have administered the question with more
consummate skill than these little incarnate fiends, till the poor old
woman was actually induced, from their confident asseverations and
plausible counterfeiting, to believe at last that she had been a witch
all her life without knowing it. She made a confession, following the
story which they had prompted, on their assurances that it was the
only means to restore them, and then was hanged upon that confession,
to which she adhered on the scaffold. Few tracts present a more vivid
picture of manners than that in which the account of this case of
witchcraft is contained. It is perhaps the rarest of the English
tr