urned alive in the market-place of
Wuerzburg.

Here ends this frightful catalogue of murder and superstition. Since that
day, the belief in witchcraft has fled from the populous abodes of men,
and taken refuge in remote villages and districts too wild, rugged, and
inhospitable to afford a resting-place for the foot of civilisation. Rude
fishers and uneducated labourers still attribute every phenomenon of
nature which they cannot account for, to the devil and witches. Catalepsy,
that wondrous disease, is still thought by ignorant gossips to be the work
of Satan; and hypochondriacs, uninformed by science of the nature of their
malady, devoutly believe in the reality of their visions. The reader would
hardly credit the extent of the delusion upon this subject in the very
heart of England at this day. Many an old woman leads a life of misery
from the unfeeling insults of her neighbours, who raise the scornful
finger and hooting voice at her, because in her decrepitude she is ugly,
spiteful, perhaps insane, and realises in her personal appearance the
description preserved by tradition of the witches of yore. Even in the
neighbourhood of great towns the taint remains of this once widely-spread
contagion. If no victims fall beneath it, the enlightenment of the law is
all that prevents a recurrence of scenes as horrid as those of the
seventeenth century. Hundreds upon hundreds of witnesses could be found to
swear to absurdities as great as those asserted by the infamous Matthew
Hopkins.

In the _Annual Register_ for 1760, an instance of the belief in witchcraft
is related, which shews how superstition lingers. A dispute arose in the
little village of Glen, in Leicestershire, between two old women, each of
whom vehemently accused the other of witchcraft. The quarrel at last ran
so high that a challenge ensued, and they both agreed to be tried by the
ordeal of swimming. They accordingly stripped to their shifts--procured
some men, who tied their thumbs and great toes together, cross-wise, and
then, with a cart-rope about their middle, suffered themselves to be
thrown into a pool of water. One of them sank immediately, but the other
continued struggling a short time upon the surface of the water, which the
mob deeming an infallible sign of her guilt, pulled her out, and insisted
that she should immediately impeach all her accomplices in the craft. She
accordingly told them that, in the neighbouring village of Burton, there
were s