have
written in Greek, Latine, or High Dutch; With some Observations and
Discoveries of the Author himself. By John Webster, Practitioner in
Physick and Chirurgery. Qui principia naturalia in seipso ignoraverit,
hic jam multum remotus est ab arte nostra, quoniam non habet radicem
veram supra quam intentionem suam fundet. Geber. Sum. perfect. l. c.
i. p. 21._

_Sed non ante datur telluris operta subire,
Auricomos quam quis discerpserit arbore foetus._
_Virg._ AEneid. l. 6.

_London, Printed by A.C. for Walter Kettilby at the Bishops-Head in
Duck-lane, 1671, 4to._"]

[Footnote 29: Dr. Whitaker's assertion, that Webster was "neglected
alike by the wise and unwise," seems to be a mere _gratis dictum_. The
age of folios was rapidly passing away; but few folios of the period
appear to have been more generally read, if we are to judge at least
from its being frequently mentioned and quoted, than Webster's
_Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft_. The same able writer's "Doubt
whether Sir Matthew Hale ever read Webster's _Discovery of Supposed
Witchcraft_," might easily have been satisfied by a reference to any
common life of that great judge, which would have shown the historian
of Whalley that Hale died before the book was published. Nor is Dr.
Whitaker correct in stating that all tradition of Webster is now lost
in the neighbourhood where he resided. The following anecdote, which
would have delighted him, I had from an old inhabitant of Burnley, to
whom it had been handed down by his grandfather:--In the days of
Webster's fanaticism, during the usurpation, he is stated, in the
zealous crusade then so common against superstitious relics, to have
headed a party by whom the three venerable crosses, now set up in the
churchyard of Whalley, commonly called the Crosses of Paulinus, and
supposed to be coeval with the first preaching of Christianity in the
North of England, were removed and taken away from their site and
appropriated as a boundary fence for some adjoining fields. After the
Restoration, and when his religious views had become sobered and
settled, he is said, in an eager desire to atone for the desecration
of which he had been guilty, to have purchased the crosses from the
person who was then in possession of them, and to have been at the
cost of re-erecting them on their present site, from which no
sacrilegious hand will, I trust, ever again remove them. It is further
sa