self and stand naked, seeming (whilest he undresseth himselfe) to shake, stamp, and crie, still hastening to be unclothed, till he be starke naked; or if you can procure none to go so far, let him onlie beginne to stampe and shake, etc., and unclothe him, and then you may (for reverence of the companie) seeme to release him.”1 The second illustration must have demanded, if possible, more credulity on the part of the audience than this harmless entertainment. Cranmer tells us that in the time of Queen Mary a monk preached a sermon at St. Paul's, the object of which was to prove the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation; and, after the manner of his kind, told the following little anecdote in support of it:-"A maid of Northgate parish in Canterbury, in pretence to wipe her mouth, kept the host in her handkerchief; and, when she came home, she put the same into a pot, close covered, and she spitted in another pot, and after a few days, she looking in the one pot, found a little young pretty babe, about a shaftmond long; and the other pot was full of gore blood." 2 34. That the audiences before which these absurdities were seriously brought, for amusement or instruction, could be excited in either case to any other feeling than good-natured contempt for a would-be impostor, seems to us now-a-days to be impossible. It was not so in the times when these 1 Scott, p. 339. Cranmer, A Confutation of Unwritten Verities, p. 66. Parker Society. ELIZABETHANS NOT FOOLS. 33 things transpired: the actors of them were not knaves, nor were their audiences fools, to any unusual extent. If any one is inclined to form a low opinion of the Elizabethans intellectually, on 'account of the divergence of their capacities of belief in this respect from his own, he does them a great injustice. Let him take at once Charles Lamb's warning, and try to understand, rather than to judge them. We, who have had the benefit of three hundred more years of experience and liberty of thought than they, should have to hide our faces for very shame had we not arrived at juster and truer conclusions upon those difficult topics that so bewildered our ancestors. But can we, with all our boasted advantages of wealth, power, and knowledge, truly say that all our aims are as high, all our desires as pure, our words as true, and our deeds as noble, as those whose opinions we feel this tendency to contemn? If not, or if indeed they have anything whatsoever to teach us in these respects, let us remember that we shall never learn the lesson wholly, perhaps not learn it at all, unless, casting aside this first impulse to despise, we try to enter fully into and understand these strange dead beliefs of the past. 5. 35. It is in this spirit that I now enter upon the second division of the subject in hand, in which I shall try to indicate the chief features of the belief in demonology as it existed during the Elizabethan period. These will be taken up in three main heads: the classification, physical appearance, and powers of the evil spirits. 36. (i.) It is difficult to discover any classification of devils as well authenticated and as universally received as that of the angels introduced by Dionysius the Areopagite, which was subsequently imported into the creed of the Western Church, and popularized in Elizabethan times by Dekker's "Hierarchie." The subject was one which, from its nature, could not be settled ex cathedrâ, and consequently the subject had to grow up as best it might, each writer adopting the arrangement that appeared to him most suitable. There was one rough but popular classification into greater and lesser devils. The former branch was subdivided into classes of various grades of power, the members of which passed under the titles of kings, dukes, marquises, lords, captains, and other dignities. Su A Malt dis CLASSIFICATION OF DEVILS. 35 Each of these was supposed to have a certain number of legions of the latter class under his command. These were the evil spirits who appeared most frequently on the earth as the emissaries of the greater fiends, to carry out their evil designs. The more important class kept for the most part in a mystical seclusion, and only appeared upon earth in cases of the greatest emergency, or when compelled to do so by conjuration. To the class of lesser devils belonged the bad angel which, together with a good one, was supposed to be assigned to every person at birth, to follow him through life-the one to tempt, the other to guard from temptation;1 so that a struggle similar to that recorded between Michael and Satan for the body of Moses was raging for the soul of every existing human being. This was not a mere theory, but a vital active belief, as the beautiful well-known lines at the commencement of the eighth canto of the second book of "The Faerie Queene," and the use Lock the made of these opposing spirits in Marlowe's " Dr. Faustus," and in "The Virgin Martyr," by Massinger and Dekker, conclusively show. 37. Another classification, which seems to retain a reminiscence of the origin of devils from pagan deities, is effected by reference to the localities supposed to be inhabited by the different classes of evil spirits. According to this arrangement we get six classes: (1.) Devils of the fire, who wander in the region near the moon. 1 Scot, p. 506. (2.) Devils of the air, who hover round the earth. (3.) Devils of the earth; to whom the fairies are allied. (4) Devils of the water. (5.) Submundane devils.1 These devils' power and desire to injure mankind appear to have increased with the proximity of their location to the earth's centre; but this classification had nothing like the hold upon the popular mind that the former grouping had, and may consequently be dismissed with this mention. 38. The greater devils, or the most important of them, had distinguishing names-strange, uncouth names; some of them telling of a heathenish origin; others inexplicable and almost unpronounceable-as Ashtaroth, Bael, Belial, Zephar, Cerberus, Phoenix, Balam (why he ?), and Haagenti, Leraie, Marchosias, Gusoin, Glasya Labolas. Scot enumerates seventynine, the above amongst them, and he does not by any means exhaust the number. As each arch-devil had twenty, thirty, or forty legions of inferior spirits under his command, and a legion was composed of six hundred and sixty-six devils, it is not surprising that the latter did not obtain distinguishing names until they made their appearance upon earth, when they frequently obtained one from the form they loved to assume; for example, the familiars of the witches in "Macbeth"-Paddock (toad), Graymalkin (cat), and . Cf. Hen. VI. v. iii. 10; 2 Hen. VI. 1. ii. 77; Ccriolanus, JV. V. 97. |