f
humor. But there was perhaps a chronological basis for the joke. Our
Saxon ancestors did not speak of Old Nicka in a spirit of jest or
levity. The bantering sense of our modern sobriquet for the Devil
appears to have crept in during the decline of witchcraft. That
frightful saturnalia of superstition was the Devil's heyday. He was
almost omnipotent and omnipresent. But as witchcraft died out, partly
through the growth of knowledge, and partly through sheer weariness on
the part of its devotees, the Devil began to lose his power. His agency
in human affairs was seen to be less potent than was imagined. People
called him Old Nick playfully, as they might talk of a toothless old
mastiff whose bark was worse than his bite. At length he was regarded as
a perfect fraud, and his sobriquet took a tinge of contempt. He is now
utterly played out except in church and chapel, where the sky-pilots
still represent him as a roaring lion. Yet, as a curious relic of old
times, it may be noted that in the law-courts, where conservatism reigns
in the cumbrous wig on the judge's head, and in the cumbrous phraseology
of indictments, criminals are still charged with being instigated by
the Devil. Nearly all the judges look upon this as so much nonsense, but
occasionally there is a pious fossil who treats it seriously. We then
hear a Judge North regret that a prisoner has devoted the abilities God
gave him to the Devil's service, and give the renegade a year's leisure
to reconsider which master he ought to serve.

During the witch mania the world was treated to a great deal of curious
information about Old Nick. What Robert Burns says of him in _Tam
O'Shanter_ is only a faint reminiscence of the wealth of demonology
which existed a few generations earlier. Old Nick used to appear at
the witches' Sabbaths in the form of a goat, or a brawny black man,
who courted all the pretty young witches and made them submit to his
embraces. Some of these crazy creatures, under examination or torture,
gave the most circumstantial accounts of their intercourse with Satan;
their revelations being of such an obscene character that they must
be left under the veil of a dead tongue. It is, of course, absurd to
suppose that anything of the kind occurred. Religious hysteria and
lubricity are closely allied, as every physician knows, and the filthy
fancies of a lively witch deserve no more attention than those of many
females in our lunatic asylums.

Behind the