nd cauntrips hellish rantin',
Like mawkins thro' the fields they're janting."

C 4 _b_. "_We want old Demdike, who dyed in the castle before she came
to her tryall._"] Worn out most probably with her imprisonment, she
having been committed in April, and the cruelties she had undergone,
both before and after her commitment. Master Nowell and Master Potts
both _wanted_ her, we may readily conceive, to fill up the miserable
pageant; but she was gone where the wicked cease from troubling, and
the weary are at rest. With the exception of Alice Nutter, in whom
interest is excited from very different grounds, Mother Demdike
attracts attention in a higher degree than any other of these Pendle
witches. She was, beyond dispute, the Erictho of Pendle. Mother
Chattox was but second in rank. There is something fearfully intense
in the expression of the former,--blind, on the last verge of the
extreme limit of human existence, and mother of a line of
witches,--"that she would pray for the said Baldwin, both still and
loud." She is introduced in Shadwell's play, the _Lancashire Witches_,
1682, as a _persona dramatis_, along with Mother Dickinson and Mother
Hargrave, two of the witches convicted in 1633, but without any regard
to the characteristic circumstances under which she appears in the
present narrative. The following invocation, which is put into her
mouth, is rather a favourable specimen of that play, certainly not one
of the worst of Shadwell's, in which there are many vigorous strokes,
with an alloy of coarseness not unusual in his works, and some
powerful conceptions of character:

Come, sisters, come, why do you stay?
Our business will not brook delay;
The owl is flown from the hollow oak,
From lakes and bogs the toads do croak;
The foxes bark, the screech-owl screams,
Wolves howl, bats fly, and the faint beams
Of glow-worms light grows bright a-pace;
The stars are fled, the moon hides her face.
The spindle now is turning round,
Mandrakes are groaning under ground:
I'th' hole i'th' ditch (our nails have made)
Now all our images are laid,
Of wax and wooll, which we must prick,
With needles urging to the quick.
Into the hole I'le poure a flood
Of black lambs bloud, to make all good.
The lamb with nails and teeth wee'l tear.
Come, where's the sacrifice? appear.

* * * * *

Oyntment for flying here I ha