, delivered his inaugural thesis, _De Crimine Magiae_ which struck
another blow at the falling monster of popular error. But a faith so
strong as that in witchcraft was not to be eradicated at once: the
arguments of learned men did not penetrate to the villages and hamlets;
but still they achieved great things; they rendered the belief an
unworking faith, and prevented the supply of victims, on which for so many
ages it had battened and grown strong.

Once more the delusion broke out; like a wild beast wounded to the death,
it collected all its remaining energies for the final convulsion, which
was to shew how mighty it had once been. Germany, which had nursed the
frightful error in its cradle, tended it on its death-bed, and Wuerzburg,
the scene of so many murders on the same pretext, was destined to be the
scene of the last. That it might lose no portion of its bad renown, the
last murder was as atrocious as the first. This case offers a great
resemblance to that of the witches of Mohra and New England, except in the
number of its victims. It happened so late as the year 1749, to the
astonishment and disgust of the rest of Europe.

[Illustration: VIEW IN WUeRZBURG.]

A number of young women in a convent at Wuerzburg fancied themselves
bewitched; they felt, like all hysteric subjects, a sense of suffocation
in the throat. They went into fits repeatedly; and one of them, who had
swallowed needles, evacuated them at abscesses, which formed in different
parts of the body. The cry of sorcery was raised, and a young woman, named
Maria Renata Saenger, was arrested on the charge of having leagued with the
devil, to bewitch five of the young ladies. It was sworn on the trial that
Maria had been frequently seen to clamber over the convent walls in the
shape of a pig--that, proceeding to the cellar, she used to drink the best
wine till she was intoxicated; and then start suddenly up in her own form.
Other girls asserted that she used to prowl about the roof like a cat, and
often penetrate into their chamber, and frighten them by her dreadful
howlings. It was also said that she had been seen in the shape of a hare,
milking the cows dry in the meadows belonging to the convent; that she
used to perform as an actress on the boards of Drury Lane theatre in
London, and, on the very same night, return upon a broomstick to Wuerzburg,
and afflict the young ladies with pains in all their limbs. Upon this
evidence she was condemned, and b