dyta_ of temples,
in caves and sacred groves, in initiations and oracular consultations,
were all prepared by fasting, watching, and prayer, for the reception of
biological influence, and possibly may have seemed to themselves to see
what others desired they should believe themselves to have actually seen.
Was Lord Shrewsbury under this influence at Caldaro?

But the reader will begin to suspect that his credulity is about to be
solicited for the aerial flights of witches on their sweeping brooms. This
apprehension may be dismissed. Witchcraft, or, to call it by its proper
pathological name, demonopathy, was a true delusion, true so far as the
belief of the monomaniacs themselves was concerned, but resting wholly in
their own distempered imagination.

From a learned and philosophic review of the great work of Calmeil, _De la
Folie_, in the _Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medicine_, we extract the
following _resume_ of the symptoms of this dreadful epidemic malady: "The
leading phenomenon was the belief of the sufferers that Satan had obtained
full mastery over them; that he was the object of their most fervent
worship, a certain portion of their life being spent in the actual company
of himself and his legion of darkness, when every crime that a diseased
imagination could suggest was committed by them. Both sexes attended at
the Devil's Sabbaths, as they were termed, where the sorcerers met,
danced, and enjoyed every wild pleasure. To these meetings they travelled
through the air, though, by the power of Satan, their bodies seemed to
remain at home. They killed children, poisoned cattle, produced storms and
plagues, and held converse with Succubi and Incubi, and other fallen
spirits. At the Sabbath all agreed, that from every country the sorcerers
arrived transported by demons. Women perched on sticks, or riding on
goats, naked, with dishevelled hair, arrived in thousands; they passed
like meteors, and their descent was more rapid than that of the eagle or
hawk, when striking his prey. Over this meeting Satan presided; indecent
dances and licentious songs went on, and an altar was raised, where Satan,
with his head downward, his feet turned up, and his back to the altar,
celebrated his blasphemous mass."

Each individual sufferer believed herself or himself to have seen these
sights, to have gone through these origies, and to have been transported
to them through the air. If there had been but a few confessions, and
thes