Page images
PDF
EPUB

G. 486. W. 439.-Thy liking is a glass.

Read:

Thy liking is the glass by which, &c.

G. 486. IV. 439.-You, sweet, have the power

To make me passionate as an April day. "Passionate is not used here in the usual sense of the word, but signifies disposed to grief;" and then we have the Variorum to confirm it.

Had Mr. Weber thought less of his index, and more of his author, he must have seen, from the first words of the very next line-" Now smile, then weep," that it alluded to the common and characteristic description of an Aprilday, changeable, subject to sudden vicissitudes, &c.

G. 489. W. 440.

Read:

such presages proves.

such presages prove.

Nonsense.

G. 490. W. 441.-Not until then?

Read: Not until when?

G.491. W. 442.-Dear Sue, I will not.

Read: Dear Sue, I shall not. It seems an acquiescence

in her own affectionate language.

G. 491. W. 442.

Read:

do not leave us.
prithee, do not, &c.

G. 492. W. 443.-Witches are SO common now-a-days, &c. "In the days of the sapient James, witchcraft, by his own royal example, was become the subject of many publications, and supposed witches were hunted down in every quarter of the kingdom without mercy."

I am weary of these audacious falsehoods, and should pass them in silence, were it not that some better natures, as Jonson says, continue to run in the same vile line, whose understandings may not be altogether so impassible to truth and honesty, as this dolt's.

"What the judgment of King James was of witchcraft, (Osborne says,) you may in part find by his treatise on that subject, and the charge he gave the Judges to be circum

spect in condemning those committed by ignorant justices for diabolical compacts. Nor had he concluded his advice in a narrower circle, as I have heard, than the denial of any such operations, but out of reasons of state, and to gratifie the Church."--This was in Scotland; and there is better authority than Osborne's for believing that James, "on his arrival in this country, gave way to the general prejudice against witches, in order to oblige his new subjects.” Witchcraft, in fact, had been the terror of the English people for many centuries. Under the Catholic princes, sorcerers and witches were hanged and burned, secundùm artem, by the Church, as heretics; scarcely had the Reformation taken place, when Henry VIII. reclaimed the victims for the civil law, and passed the Act making witchcraft felony. This, of course, fell into disuse under Mary, who had bloodier and more agreeable business in hand; but scarcely was Elizabeth seated on the throne, when she was assailed on all sides for the recal of the statute of felony; and reminded by some of the principal clergy and laity, that "witches and sorcerers were wonderfully increasing, and that her Majesty's subjects pined away until death." In consequence of this alarming representation, "her Majesty and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled" made witchcraft once more felony. This was many years before James was born. Again the law fell into disuse, much to the discomfort of her subjects, who never ceased to preach and petition for its revival, and who would probably have been heard, had not the Pope officiously engaged the gallows about this period, for the fit disposal of the culprits under other names-poisoners, seminaries, and traitors.

While James was yet a stripling, he had been indulged with the cross-examination of the Scotch witches; for the defaults of his education, which (thanks to the satellites of the Regent and Elizabeth) was at once frivolous and gloomy,

had rendered him eagerly inquisitive after supernatural agencies, in which he had been trained from infancy to believe. He appears to have furnished himself with all the magical lumber of the times; and from this, together with his small gleanings on the spot, to have drawn up his Dialogue, on which he apparently prided himself not a little. But James was an honest man; those who made him credulous could not make him cruel and unjust; and many things occurred, which disturbed his confidence in his creed, before he came to the throne of this kingdom. It may be reasonably doubted, whether there was an individual in England who cared less about witches than James I., at the moment of his accession. In the Act which made witchcraft felony, he rather followed than led, and was pushed on by some of the wisest and best men of the age, who could scarcely restrain their impatience for the reenactment of the old severities. Even then, the King hesitated; and the Bill was recalled and recast three several times. Yet we are required to believe that witchcraft was scarcely heard of in this country," till the example of the sapient James made the subject popular!"

It is equally false, that the reprint of the Demonologie, which appeared in Scotland more than thirty years before the date of Ford's play, encouraged the publication of works of this kind. There were far more treatises on the subject of sorcery, witchcraft, &c. published under Elizabeth, than under James; many of them drawn up by profound and elaborate scholars. However this be, James, as has been already observed, had greatly altered his creed before he left Scotland, and not long after renounced it altogether. Fuller, in his Church History, speaks in yet stronger terms of this monarch's disbelief in witchcraft; and even Hutchinson admits, (page 216,) that "he came off very much from the notion, in his elder years." The sullen republican, Osborne, who was strongly prejudiced

against James, has yet the honesty to give an anecdote, on his own knowledge, in which the King, by his personal investigation of an imposture, (and, indeed, adds Osborne, "I must confess he was the promptest man living in detecting an imposture,") saved the life of a poor old woman whom his wise justices would have hung for a witch. The truth is, that his well-meaning curiosity (unkingly as it may be thought) rendered it unsafe to play those paltry juggles with him by which so many innocents suffered under other rulers. So far, indeed, were witches from being hunted down without mercy under James, that, after the Lancashire trials in 1612, (with which, by the way, he had nothing to do,) they appear to have been almost forgotten and it was not till the fanatics of the Long Parliament (twenty years after the decease of this monarch) had taken all power into their own hands, that the "hunters" were let slip, and stimulated to the pursuit and destruction of these miserable creatures, "in every part of the kingdom, without mercy." In the twenty-three years which James sat on the English throne, it may be fairly questioned whether so many witches suffered death: No, no, it was not this calumniated prince, who, in 1645,* dispatched that monster of stupidity and blood, Hopkins, the witchfinder, and Stern, accompanied by two Puritan ministers, and occasionally assisted, as it appears, by Mr. Calamy, to see there was no fraud or wrong doue"! and the good Mr. Baxter, who took no small satisfaction in the process. The hanging of a great number of witches," as the latter says, "by the discovery

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

The Editor of the last edition of the State Trials observes, with great naïveté, Witches seem to have abounded in England more than usual about the middle of the seventeenth century:" they do so; but he should have remembered, that James, the object of his spleen, is not accountable for this.Vol. iv. p. 819.

+Hutchinson marks, with just indignation, (87,) the slight manner in which this most credulous and unfeeling puritan (who experienced no "compunctious visitings" to the last) notices the brutal sacrifice of these poor creatures; and,

of Hopkins in 1645, 1646, is famously known." And, indeed, so it ought to be; for it was famously performed. In Suffolk, and the neighbouring counties, in two years only, Mr. Ady says there were nearly a hundred hanged ;* Hutchinson computes them at above fourscore; Butler says, that, within the first year, threescore were hung in one shire alone; and Zachary Grey affirms, that he "had seen a list of those who suffered for witchcraft, during the Presbyterian domination of the Long Parliament, amounting to more than three thousand names!" Yet we hear of nothing but the persecution of witches by "the sapient James;" and this base and sottish calumny is repeated from pen to pen, without fear and without

shame!

G. 493. W. 444.

Read:

those remote places.

those remoter places. And for,

when he has been three days absent-Read, when he has been but three days absent. The force of the expression depends upon it.

G. 494. W. 445.-Thou'st the way.

Read: Thou know'st the way.

G. 498. IV. 448.-In sins and mischief.
Read: In sins and mischiefs.

G. 499. W. 449.-

This is altogether wrong.

the dowry of our sin.

Read:

the dowry of my sin. Frank alludes to the marriage portion which he had just received with Susan.

above all, the careless contempt which he displays in speaking of "the hanging of an old reading (so marked by Baxter) parson, named Lowes."-p. 80. He had two imps, it seems; but this was not the worst of him; he was a malignant, and read Homilies!

It might almost raise a smile in these times, if the subject were not of so horrible a cast, to mark the easy manner in which Whitelocke, the Parliamentary Commissioner, in his Memorials, records the transactions of the day. "July 25th, 1645, twenty witches in Norfolk executed!" And thus he goes on. I have not the heart to proceed with his list of victims; but they must amount to many hundreds. "In one village," he says, in 1650,"out of fourteen families, fourteen individuals were burned for witches." And so the saints drove merrily on.-Poor James!

« PreviousContinue »