ies
and "walking ghosts," and lastly those who believed there were no
witches. "Of this opinion I hear and see there be many, some of them men
of worth, religious and honest."[76]

The pamphlet-writers of James's reign had adjusted themselves to meet
opposition. Those of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth were prepared
to meet ridicule.[77] "There are some," says the narrator of a Yorkshire
story, "who are of opinion that there are no Divells nor any witches....
Men in this Age are grown so wicked, that they are apt to believe there
are no greater Divells than themselves."[78] Another writer, to bolster
up his story before a skeptical public, declares that he is "very chary
and hard enough to believe passages of this nature."[79]

We have said that the narrators of witch stories fortified themselves
against ridicule. That ridicule obviously must have found frequent
expression in conversation, but sometimes it even crept into the
newspapers and tracts of the day. The Civil Wars had developed a regular
London press. We have already met with expressions of serious opinion
from it.[80] But not all were of that sort. In 1654 the _Mercurius
Democritus_, the _Punch_ of its time, took occasion to make fun of the
stories of the supernatural then in circulation. There was, it declared,
a strange story of a trance and apparition, a ghost was said to be
abroad, a woman had hanged herself in a tobacco pipe. With very broad
humor the journal took off the strange reports of the time and concluded
with the warning that in "these distempered times" it was not safe for
an "idle-pated woman" to look up at the skies.[81]

The same mocking incredulity had manifested itself in 1648 in a little
brochure entitled, _The Devil seen at St. Albans, Being a true Relation
how the Devill was seen there in a Cellar, in the likeness of a Ram; and
how a Butcher came and cut his throat, and sold some of it, and dressed
the rest for himselfe, inviting many to supper, who did eat of it_.[82]
The story was a clever parody of the demon tracts that had come out so
frequently in the exciting times of the wars. The writer made his point
clear when he declared that his story was of equal value with anything
that "Britannicus" ever wrote.[83] The importance of these indications
may be overestimated. But they do mean that there were those bold enough
to make fun. A decade or two later ridicule became a two-edged knife,
cutting superstition right and left. But e