All other limners made him merely grotesque, but Milton
made him awful. In this the monks shewed themselves but miserable
romancers; for their object undoubtedly was to represent the fiend as
terrible as possible. But there was nothing grand about their Satan; on
the contrary, he was a low, mean devil, whom it was easy to circumvent,
and fine fun to play tricks with. But, as is well and eloquently remarked
by a modern writer,[23] the subject has also its serious side. An Indian
deity, with its wild distorted shape and grotesque attitude, appears
merely ridiculous when separated from its accessories and viewed by
daylight in a museum; but restore it to the darkness of its own hideous
temple, bring back to our recollection the victims that have bled upon its
altar or been crushed beneath its car, and our sense of the ridiculous
subsides into aversion and horror. So, while the superstitious dreams of
former times are regarded as mere speculative insanities, we may be for a
moment amused with the wild incoherencies of the patients; but when we
reflect that out of these hideous misconceptions of the principle of evil
arose the belief in witchcraft--that this was no dead faith, but one
operating on the whole being of society, urging on the wisest and the
mildest to deeds of murder, or cruelties scarcely less than murder--that
the learned and the beautiful, young and old, male and female, were
devoted by its influence to the stake and the scaffold--every feeling
disappears, except that of astonishment that such things could be, and
humiliation at the thought that the delusion was as lasting as it was
universal.

[23] See article on "Demonology" in the sixth volume of the
_Foreign Quarterly Review_.

Besides this chief personage, there was an infinite number of inferior
demons, who played conspicuous parts in the creed of witchcraft. The pages
of Bekker, Leloyer, Bodin, Delrio, and De Lancre, abound with descriptions
of the qualities of these imps, and the functions which were assigned
them. From these authors,--three of whom were commissioners for the trial
of witches, and who wrote from the confessions made by the supposed
criminals and the evidence delivered against them,--and from the more
recent work of M. Jules Garinet, the following summary of the creed has
been, with great pains, extracted. The student who is desirous of knowing
more is referred to the works in question; he will find enough in every
leaf