he did
not come upon this signal, he proceeded to bury it the best way he
could.

Such was the general persecution under Messieurs Espiagnel and De
Lancre. Many similar scenes occurred in France, till the edict of Louis
XIV. discharging all future prosecutions for witchcraft, after which the
crime itself was heard of no more.[52]

[Footnote 52: The reader may sup full on such wild horrors in the
_causes celebres_.]

While the spirit of superstition was working such horrors in France, it
was not, we may believe, more idle in other countries of Europe. In
Spain, particularly, long the residence of the Moors, a people putting
deep faith in all the day-dreams of witchcraft, good and evil genii,
spells and talismans, the ardent and devotional temper of the old
Christians dictated a severe research after sorcerers as well as
heretics, and relapsed Jews or Mahommedans. In former times, during the
subsistence of the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, a school was supposed to
be kept open in Toboso for the study, it is said, of magic, but more
likely of chemistry, algebra, and other sciences, which, altogether
mistaken by the ignorant and vulgar, and imperfectly understood even by
those who studied them, were supposed to be allied to necromancy, or at
least to natural magic. It was, of course, the business of the
Inquisition to purify whatever such pursuits had left of suspicious
Catholicism, and their labours cost as much blood on accusations of
witchcraft and magic as for heresy and relapse.

Even the colder nations of Europe were subject to the same epidemic
terror for witchcraft, and a specimen of it was exhibited in the sober
and rational country of Sweden about the middle of last century, an
account of which, being translated into English by a respectable
clergyman, Doctor Horneck, excited general surprise how a whole people
could be imposed upon to the degree of shedding much blood, and
committing great cruelty and injustice, on account of the idle
falsehoods propagated by a crew of lying children, who in this case were
both actors and witnesses.

The melancholy truth that "the human heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked," is by nothing proved so strongly as by
the imperfect sense displayed by children of the sanctity of moral
truth. Both the gentlemen and the mass of the people, as they advance in
years, learn to despise and avoid falsehood; the former out of pride,
and from a remaining feeling, der