stimulant, another ally
to the cause of compassion and common sense started up, in the person
of one whose name has rounded many a period and given point to many
an invective. To find the proscribed author of the _Patriarcha_
purging with "euphrasy and rue" the eyes of the dispensers of justice,
and shouldering the crowd to obtain for reason a fair and impartial
hearing, is indeed like meeting with Saul among the prophets. If there
be one name which has been doomed to run the gauntlet, and against
which every pert and insolent political declaimer has had his fling,
it is that of this unfortunate writer; yet in his short but masterly
and unanswerable "Advertisement to the Jurymen of England, touching
Witches, together with a difference between an English and Hebrew
Witch," first published in 1653, 4to., he has addressed himself so
cogently and decisively to the main fallacy of the arguments in favour
of witchcraft which rested their force on Scripture misunderstood, and
has so pertinently and popularly urged the points to be considered,
that his tract must have had the greatest weight on the class to whom
his reasoning was principally addressed, and on whose fiat the fates
of his unhappy clients may be said to have hung. For this good
service, reason and common sense owe Sir Robert Filmer a debt which
does not yet appear to have been paid. The verdict of proscription
against him was pronounced by the most incompetent and superficial aera
of our literature, and no friendly appellant has yet moved the court
of posterity for its reversal. Yet without entering upon the theory of
the patriarchal scheme, which after all, perhaps, was not so
irrational as may be supposed, or discussing on an occasion like the
present the conflicting theories of government, it may be allowable to
express a doubt whether even the famous author of the "Essay on the
Human Understanding," to whose culminating star the decadence of the
rival intelligence is attributable, can be shewn to have been as much
in advance of his generation in the time of king William, as from the
tract on witchcraft, and another written on a different subject, but
with equally enlightened views,[20] Sir Robert Filmer manifestly
appears to have outrun his at the period of the usurpation.[21]

[Footnote 20: I allude to his little tract on Usury.]

[Footnote 21: Between the period of the publication of Filmer's
Advertisement and the appearance of Wagstaffe's work, a tract was