rrangements, they
wrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of the
spectators in a frightful manner.37 There is every reason to
suppose that such deceptions miracles in which secret speaking
tubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were most
frequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors were
unscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one of
the foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Age
in the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and so
intense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarming
spirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So the
Danish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says to
Hamlet, "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the
night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul
crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away."

36 If any one would see in how many forms the faith in hell and in
the devil appeared, let him look over the pages of the
"Dictionnaire Infernal," by J. Collin de Plancy.

37 Maclaine's trans, of Mosheim's Eccl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 10,
note.

38 Manufactures of the Ancients, pub. by Harper and Brothers,
1845, part iv. ch. 3.

When the shadows began to fall thick behind the sunken sun, these
poor creatures were thought to spring from their beds of torture,
to wander amidst the scenes of their sins or to haunt the living;
but at the earliest scent of morn, the first note of the cock,
they must hie to their fire again. Midnight was the high noon of
ghostly and demoniac revelry on the earth. As the hour fell with
brazen clang from the tower, the belated traveller, afraid of the
rustle of his own dress, the echo of his own footfall, the
wavering of his own shadow, afraid of his own thoughts, would
breathe the suppressed invocation, "Angels and ministers of grace
defend us!" as the idea crept curdling over his brain and through
his veins, "It is the very witching time of night, When
churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this
world."

Working in alliance with the foregoing forces of superstition was
the powerful influence of the various forms of insanity which
remarkably abounded in the Middle Age. The insane person, it was
believed, was possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives,
were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernal
visions, diabolical interviews, encounters