increased within
your grace's realm. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death;
their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed,
their senses are bereft!" Before remonstrances such as these the statute
against witchcraft was again enacted; but though literature and the
drama show the hold which a belief in satanic agency had gained on the
popular fancy, the temper of the times was too bold and self-reliant,
its intelligence too keen and restless, its tone too secular, to furnish
that atmosphere of panic in which fanaticism is bred.

It was not till the close of the Queen's reign, as hope darkened round
Protestantism and the Puritan temper woke a fresh faith in the
supernatural, that the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of the
unhappy women who were held to be witches became a marked feature of the
time. To men who looked on the world about them and the soul within them
as battle-fields for a never-ceasing contest between God and the Devil,
it was natural enough to ascribe every evil that happened to man, either
in soul or body, to the invisible agency of the spirit of ill. A share
of his supernatural energies was the bait by which he was held to lure
the wicked to their own destruction; and women above all were believed
to barter their souls for the possession of power which lifted them
above the weakness of their sex. Sober men asserted that the beldame,
whom boys hooted in the streets and who groped in the gutter for bread,
could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that
she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could
rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships
and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her
broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield
herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism
that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of
the Bible, for to question the existence of sorcerer or daemoniac seemed
questioning the veracity of the Scriptures themselves. Pity fell before
the stern injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"; and the
squire who would have shrunk from any conscious cruelty as from a blow
looked on without ruth as the torturers ran needles into the witch's
flesh, or swam her in the witch's pool, or hurried her to the witch's
stake.

[Sidenote: The Protestant defeat.]

But