ny part of it myself), and betake me to
such places where I do and may punish (not only) without control, but
with thanks and recompense. So I humbly take my leave, and rest your
servant to be commanded,

"MATTHEW HOPKINS."

[Footnote 58: Of Parliament.]

The sensible and courageous Mr. Gaul describes the tortures employed by
this fellow as equal to any practised in the Inquisition. "Having taken
the suspected witch, she is placed in the middle of a room, upon a stool
or table, cross-legged, or in some other uneasy posture, to which, if
she submits not, she is then bound with cords; there she is watched and
kept without meat or sleep for four-and-twenty hours, for, they say,
they shall within that time see her imp come and suck. A little hole is
likewise made in the door for the imps to come in at; and lest they
should come in some less discernible shape, they that watch are taught
to be ever and anon sweeping the room, and if they see any spiders or
flies, to kill them; and if they cannot kill them, they may be sure they
are their imps."

If torture of this kind was applied to the Reverend Mr. Lewis, whose
death is too slightly announced by Mr. Baxter, we can conceive him, or
any man, to have indeed become so weary of his life as to acknowledge
that, by means of his imps, he sunk a vessel, without any purpose of
gratification to be procured to himself by such iniquity. But in another
cause a judge would have demanded some proof of the _corpus delecti_,
some evidence of a vessel being lost at the period, whence coming and
whither bound; in short, something to establish that the whole story was
not the idle imagination of a man who might have been entirely deranged,
and certainly was so at the time he made the admission. John Lewis was
presented to the vicarage of Brandiston, near Framlington, in Suffolk,
6th May, 1596, where he lived about fifty years, till executed as a
wizard on such evidence as we have seen. Notwithstanding the story of
his alleged confession, he defended himself courageously at his trial,
and was probably condemned rather as a royalist and malignant than for
any other cause. He showed at the execution considerable energy, and to
secure that the funeral service of the church should be said over his
body, he read it aloud for himself while on the road to the gibbet.

We have seen that in 1647 Hopkins's tone became lowered, and he began to
disavow some of the cruelties he had formerly practised. A