l taste, and a beautiful
poet, being no other than Edward Fairfax of Fayston, in Knaresborough
Forest, the translator of Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered." In allusion to
his credulity on such subjects, Collins has introduced the following
elegant lines:--

"How have I sate while piped the pensive wind,
To hear thy harp, by British Fairfax strung;
Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sung!"

Like Mr. Throgmorton in the Warbois case, Mr. Fairfax accused six of his
neighbours of tormenting his children by fits of an extraordinary kind,
by imps, and by appearing before the afflicted in their own shape during
the crisis of these operations. The admitting this last circumstance to
be a legitimate mode of proof, gave a most cruel advantage against the
accused, for it could not, according to the ideas of the demonologists,
be confuted even by the most distinct _alibi_. To a defence of that sort
it was replied that the afflicted person did not see the actual witch,
whose corporeal presence must indeed have been obvious to every one in
the room as well as to the afflicted, but that the evidence of the
sufferers related to the appearance of their _spectre_, or apparition;
and this was accounted a sure sign of guilt in those whose forms were so
manifested during the fits of the afflicted, and who were complained of
and cried out upon by the victim. The obvious tendency of this doctrine,
as to visionary or spectral evidence, as it was called, was to place the
life and fame of the accused in the power of any hypochondriac patient
or malignant impostor, who might either seem to see, or aver she saw,
the _spectrum_ of the accused old man or old woman, as if enjoying and
urging on the afflictions which she complained of; and, strange to tell,
the fatal sentence was to rest, not upon the truth of the witnesses'
eyes, but that of their imagination. It happened fortunately for
Fairfax's memory, that the objects of his prosecution were persons of
good character, and that the judge was a man of sense, and made so wise
and skilful a charge to the jury, that they brought in a verdict of not
guilty.

The celebrated case of "the Lancashire witches" (whose name was and will
be long remembered, partly from Shadwell's play, but more from the
ingenious and well-merited compliment to the beauty of the females of
that province which it was held to contain), followed soon after.
Whether the first notice of thi