tches, for their abominations; that she had seen
them assume the form of goats, wolves, and other animals; and that many
noted witches had borne them five, six, and seven children at a birth, who
had heads like toads, and legs like spiders. Being asked if the Jesuits
were far from her, she replied that they were in the room beside her. The
Duke of Brunswick led his astounded friends away, and explained the
stratagem. This was convincing proof to both of them that thousands of
persons had suffered unjustly; they knew their own innocence, and
shuddered to think what their fate might have been if an enemy instead of
a friend had put such a confession into the mouth of a criminal. One of
these Jesuits was Frederick Spee, the author of the _Cautio Criminalis_,
published in 1631. This work, exposing the horrors of the witch-trials,
had a most salutary effect in Germany: Schonbrunn, Archbishop and Elector
of Menz, abolished the torture entirely within his dominions, and his
example was imitated by the Duke of Brunswick and other potentates. The
number of supposed witches immediately diminished, and the violence of the
mania began to subside. The Elector of Brandenburg issued a rescript, in
1654, with respect to the case of Anna of Ellerbrock, a supposed witch,
forbidding the use of torture, and stigmatising the swimming of witches as
an unjust, cruel, and deceitful test.

This was the beginning of the dawn after the long-protracted darkness. The
tribunals no longer condemned witches to execution by hundreds in a year.
Wuerzburg, the grand theatre of the burnings, burned but one where, forty
years previously, it had burned three score. From 1660 to 1670 the
electoral chambers, in all parts of Germany, constantly commuted the
sentence of death passed by the provincial tribunals into imprisonment for
life, or burning on the cheek.

[Illustration: ROUEN.]

A truer philosophy had gradually disabused the public mind. Learned men
freed themselves from the trammels of a debasing superstition, and
governments, both civil and ecclesiastical, repressed the popular delusion
they had so long encouraged. The parliament of Normandy condemned a number
of women to death, in the year 1670, on the old charge of riding on
broomsticks to the Domdaniel; but Louis XIV. commuted the sentence into
banishment for life. The parliament remonstrated, and sent the king the
following remarkable request. The reader will perhaps be glad to see this
document