would not be accounted both a witch and a
strumpet. Her half-witted old mother caught at the idea of a few weeks'
longer life, and asserted that she was pregnant. The court was convulsed
with laughter, in which the wretched victim herself joined; and this was
accounted an additional proof that she was a witch. The whole family were
executed on the 7th of April, 1593.

Sir Samuel Cromwell, as lord of the manor, received the sum of 40l. out of
the confiscated property of the Samuels, which he turned into a
rent-charge of 40s. yearly, for the endowment of an annual sermon or
lecture upon the enormity of witchcraft, and this case in particular, to
be preached by a doctor or bachelor of divinity of Queen's College,
Cambridge. I have not been able to ascertain the exact date at which this
annual lecture was discontinued; but it appears to have been preached so
late as 1718, when Dr. Hutchinson published his work upon witchcraft.

To carry on in proper chronological order the history of the witch
delusion in the British isles, it will be necessary to examine into what
was taking place in Scotland during all that part of the sixteenth century
anterior to the accession of James VI. to the crown of England. We
naturally expect that the Scotch--a people renowned from the earliest
times for their powers of imagination--should be more deeply imbued with
this gloomy superstition than their neighbours of the south. The nature of
their soil and climate tended to encourage the dreams of early ignorance.
Ghosts, goblins, wraiths, kelpies, and a whole host of spiritual beings,
were familiar to the dwellers by the misty glens of the Highlands and the
romantic streams of the Lowlands. Their deeds, whether of good or ill,
were enshrined in song, and took a greater hold upon the imagination
because "verse had sanctified them." But it was not till the religious
reformers began the practice of straining Scripture to the severest
extremes that the arm of the law was called upon to punish witchcraft as a
crime _per se_. What Pope Innocent VIII. had done for Germany and France,
the preachers of the Reformation did for the Scottish people. Witchcraft,
instead of being a mere article of faith, became enrolled in the
statute-book; and all good subjects and true Christians were called upon
to take arms against it. The ninth parliament of Queen Mary passed an act
in 1563, which decreed the punishment of death against witches and
consulters with witche