ssed themselves to be witches, and
were pardoned; in 1657 the witch-judge Nicholas Remy boasted
of having burnt nine hundred persons in fifteen years; in
one German principality alone, at least two hundred and
forty-two persons were burnt between 1646 and 1651,
including many children from one to six years of age; in
1749 Maria Renata was burnt at Wurtzburg for witchcraft; on
January 17th, 1775, nine old women were burnt at Kalish, in
Poland, on a charge of having bewitched and rendered
unfruitful the lands belonging to the palatinate; at
Landshut, in Bavaria, in 1756, a young girl of thirteen
years was convicted of impure intercourse with the Devil and
put to death. There were also executions for sorcery at
Seville, in Spain, in 1781, and at Glarus, in Switzerland,
in 1783; while even as late as December 15th, 1802, five
women were condemned to death for sorcery at Patna, in the
Bengal Presidency, by the Brahmins, and were all executed.

IN ENGLAND the record of Witchcraft is also a
melancholy chapter. A statute was enacted declaring all
witchcraft and sorcery to be felony without benefit of
clergy, 33 Henry VIII. 1541; and again 5 Elizabeth, 1562,
and 1 James I. 1603. The 73rd Canon of the Church, 1603,
prohibits the Clergy from casting out devils. Barrington
estimates the judicial murders for witchcraft in England,
during two hundred years, at 30,000; Matthew Hopkins, the
"witch-finder," caused the judicial murder of about one
hundred persons in Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, 1645-7; Sir
Matthew Hale burnt two persons for witchcraft in 1664; about
1676 seventeen or eighteen persons were burnt as witches at
St. Osyths, in Essex; in 1705 two pretended witches were
executed at Northampton, and five others seven years
afterwards; in 1716, a Mrs. Hicks, and her daughter, a
little girl of nine years old, are said to have been hanged
as witches at Huntingdon, but of this there seems to be some
doubt. The last really authentic trial in England for
witchcraft took place in 1712, when the jury convicted an
old woman named Jane Wenham, of Walkerne, a little village
in the north of Hertfordshire, and she was sentenced to be
hanged. The judge, however, quietly procured a reprieve for
her, and a kind-hearted gentleman in the neighbourhood