ty pleasures wrung from horny-handed labour.
This Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Holt, may be taken as one of the
greatest, if of the less noisy and notorious, benefactors of England
known; setting himself so firmly as he did against this cruel and debasing
superstition, and so manfully upholding the claims of humanity and common
sense against all the "possibilities" of idealism, and the wild errings of
credulity. From his time the witch madness sensibly declined, and folks
woke gradually to the possession of their ordinary faculties.

THE SURREY DEMONIAC.[156]

"What, Satan! is this the Dancing that Richard gave himself to thee for?
Can'st thou Dance no better? Ransack the old Records of all past Times and
Places in thy Memory: Can'st thou not there find out some better way of
Trampling? Pump thine Invention dry: Cannot that universal Seed-plot of
subtile Wiles and Stratagems spring up one new Method of Cutting Capers?
Is this the top of Skill and Pride, to shuffle Feet, and brandish Knees
thus, and to trip like a Doe, and skip like a Squirrel? And wherein
differs thy Leapings from the Hoppings of a Frog, or Bouncings of a Goat,
or Friskings of a Dog, or Gesticulations of a Monkey? And cannot a Palsy
shake such a loose Leg as that? Dost thou not twirl like a Calf that hath
the Turn, and twitch up thy Houghs just like a Spring-hault Tit?" This was
one of the conversations, or rather exhortations, which the dissenting
ministers had with the devil inhabiting Richard Dugdale--he who was called
by some the Surrey demoniac,[157] by others the impostor, as faith or
reason was the stronger. Richard drew largely upon the faith of his
generation, largely even for the credulous generation flourishing in the
year of our Lord 1695: for Richard the "possessed" vomited gold, silver,
and brass rings, hair buttons, blue stones like flints, and once a big
stone bloody at the edges; and he was transformed sometimes to the manner
of a horse, when he would gallop round the barn on all fours, quite as
quickly as any cob ever foaled, and whinny like a cob, and eat provender
like a cob; and sometimes he was like a dog, "harring" and snarling and
growling and barking so like a mastiff, that once a dog, a real mastiff
and no counterfeit, set upon him, and would have given him rather an
undesirable taste of canine fraternity had he not been prevented. Then he
would be heavy or light in the same fit--now so heavy that six men could
not lift him,