lling, on
certain conditions, to be useful and friendly to him. Such an
intercourse was certainly far short of the witch's renouncing her
salvation, delivering herself personally to the devil, and at once
ensuring condemnation in this world, together with the like doom in the
next.

Accordingly, the credulous, who, in search of health, knowledge,
greatness, or moved by any of the numberless causes for which men seek
to look into futurity, were anxious to obtain superhuman assistance, as
well as the numbers who had it in view to dupe such willing clients,
became both cheated and cheaters, alike anxious to establish the
possibility of a harmless process of research into futurity, for
laudable, or at least innocent objects, as healing diseases and the
like; in short, of the existence of white magic, as it was called, in
opposition to that black art exclusively and directly derived from
intercourse with Satan. Some endeavoured to predict a man's fortune in
marriage or his success in life by the aspect of the stars; others
pretended to possess spells, by which they could reduce and compel an
elementary spirit to enter within a stone, a looking-glass, or some
other local place of abode, and confine her there by the power of an
especial charm, conjuring her to abide and answer the questions of her
master. Of these we shall afterwards say something; but the species of
evasion now under our investigation is that of the fanatics or impostors
who pretended to draw information from the equivocal spirits called
fairies; and the number of instances before us is so great as induces us
to believe that the pretence of communicating with Elfland, and not with
the actual demon, was the manner in which the persons accused of
witchcraft most frequently endeavoured to excuse themselves, or at least
to alleviate the charges brought against them of practising sorcery. But
the Scottish law did not acquit those who accomplished even praiseworthy
actions, such as remarkable cures by mysterious remedies; and the
proprietor of a patent medicine who should in those days have attested
his having wrought such miracles as we see sometimes advertised, might
perhaps have forfeited his life before he established the reputation of
his drop, elixir, or pill.

Sometimes the soothsayers, who pretended to act on this information from
sublunary spirits, soared to higher matters than the practice of physic,
and interfered in the fate of nations. When James I.