the country. Pretenders to witchcraft, fortune-tellers,
conjurors, and all their train, were liable only to the common punishment
of rogues and impostors--imprisonment and the pillory.

In Scotland, the delusion also assumed the same phases, and was gradually
extinguished in the light of civilisation. As in England, the progress of
improvement was slow. Up to the year 1665, little or no diminution of the
mania was perceptible. In 1643, the General Assembly recommended that the
privy council should institute a standing commission, composed of any
"understanding gentlemen or magistrates," to try the witches, who were
stated to have increased enormously of late years. In 1649, an act was
passed, confirmatory of the original statute of Queen Mary, explaining
some points of the latter which were doubtful, and enacting severe
penalties, not only against witches themselves, but against all who
covenanted with them, or sought by their means to pry into the secrets of
futurity, or cause any evil to the life, lands, or limbs of their
neighbours. For the next ten years, the popular madness upon this subject
was perhaps more furious than ever; upwards of four thousand persons
suffered for the crime during that interval. This was the consequence of
the act of parliament and the unparalleled severity of the magistrates;
the latter frequently complained that for two witches they burned one day,
there were ten to burn the next: they never thought that they themselves
were the cause of the increase. In a single circuit, held at Glasgow, Ayr,
and Stirling, in 1659, seventeen unhappy creatures were burned by judicial
sentence for trafficking with Satan. In one day (November 7, 1661), the
privy council issued no less than fourteen commissions for trials in the
provinces. Next year, the violence of the persecution seems to have
abated. From 1662 to 1668, although "the understanding gentlemen and
magistrates" already mentioned, continued to try and condemn, the High
Court of Justiciary had but one offender of this class to deal with, and
she was acquitted. James Welsh, a common pricker, was ordered to be
publicly whipped through the streets of Edinburgh for falsely accusing a
woman of witchcraft; a fact which alone proves that the superior court
sifted the evidence in these cases with much more care and severity than
it had done a few years previously. The enlightened Sir George Mackenzie,
styled by Dryden "the noble wit of Scotland," laboured