the cliff, he describes the being from whom he
is supposed to have just parted, thus:--

"As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons: he had a thousand noses;
Horns whelked and waved like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend."[3]

It can hardly be but that the "thousand noses" are intended as a
satirical hit at the enormity of the popular belief.

[Footnote 1: Act I. sc. 2.]

[Footnote 2: Act V. sc. ii. l. 285.]

[Footnote 3: Lear, IV. vi. 69.]

43. In addition to this normal type, common to all these devils, each
one seems to have had, like the greater devils, a favourite form in
which he made his appearance when conjured; generally that of some
animal, real or imagined. It was telling of

"the moldwarp and the ant,
Of the dreamer Merlin, and his prophecies;
And of a dragon and a finless fish,
A clipwinged griffin, and a moulten raven,
A couching lion, and a ramping cat,"[1]

that annoyed Harry Hotspur so terribly; and neither in this allusion,
which was suggested by a passage in Holinshed,[2] nor in "Macbeth,"
where he makes the three witches conjure up their familiars in the
shapes of an armed head, a bloody child, and a child crowned, has
Shakspere gone beyond the fantastic conceptions of the time.

[Footnote 1: I Hen. IV. III. i. 148.]

[Footnote 2: p. 521, c. 2.]

44. (iii.) But the third proposed section, which deals with the powers
and functions exercised by the evil spirits, is by far the most
interesting and important; and the first branch of the series is one
that suggests itself as a natural sequence upon what has just been said
as to the ordinary shapes in which devils appeared, namely, the capacity
to assume at will any form they chose.

45. In the early and middle ages it was universally believed that a
devil could, of his own inherent power, call into existence any manner
of body that it pleased his fancy to inhabit, or that would most conduce
to the success of any contemplated evil. In consequence of this belief
the devils became the rivals, indeed the successful rivals, of Jupiter
himself in the art of physical tergiversation. There was, indeed, a
tradition that a devil could not create any animal form of less size
than a barley-corn, and that it was in consequence of this incapacity
that the magicians of Egypt--those indubitable devil-worshippers--failed
to produce lice, as Moses did, although they had been so successful in