York, gave birth to one who was
destined so utterly to demolish the unstable and already shaken and
tottering structure which Bodin, Delrio, and their followers had set
up, as not to leave one stone of that unhallowed edifice remaining
upon another. Of the various course of life of John Webster, the
author of "The Displaying of supposed Witchcraft," his travels,
troubles, and persecutions; of the experience he had had in restless
youth and in unsettled manhood of religion under various forms,
amongst religionists of almost every denomination; and of those
profound and wide-ranging researches in every art and science in which
his vigorous intellect delighted, and by which it was in declining age
enlightened, sobered and composed; it is much to be regretted that we
have not his own narrative, written in the calm evening of his days,
when he walked the slopes of Pendle, from where,

"Through shadow dimly seen
Rose Clid'row's castle grey;"[23]

when, to use his own expressions, he lived a "solitary and sedentary
life, _mihi et musis_, having more converse with the dead than the
living, that is, more with books than with men." The facts for his
biography are scanty and meagre, and are rather collected by inference
from his works, than from any other source. He was born at Thornton on
the 3rd of February, 1610. From a passing notice of A. a Wood, and an
incidental allusion in his own works, he may be presumed to have
passed some time at Cambridge, though with what views, or at what
period of his life, is uncertain. He was ordained Presbyter by Dr.
Morton, when Bishop of Durham, who was, it will be recollected, the
sagacious prelate by whom the frauds of the boy of Bilson were
detected. In the year 1634, Webster was curate of Kildwick in Craven,
and while in that cure the scene occurred which he has so vividly
sketched in the passage after quoted, and which supplied the hint, and
laid the foundation, for the work which has perpetuated his fame. How
long he continued in this cure we know not: but, if one authority may
be relied on, he was Master of the Free Grammar School at Clitheroe in
1643. To this foundation he may be considered as a great benefactor,
for, from information supplied from a manuscript source, I find that
he recovered for its use, with considerable trouble and no small
personal charge, an income of about L60. per annum, which had been
given to the school, but was illegally diverted and withh