Project Gutenberg's Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft, by Sir Walter Scott

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft

Author: Sir Walter Scott

Release Date: December 25, 2004 [EBook #14461]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON DEMONOLOGY ***

Produced by Clare Boothby, Paul Moots and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

LETTERS ON DEMONOLOGY

AND WITCHCRAFT

BY

SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART.

With An Introduction By Henry Morley Ll.d., Professor Of English
Literature At University College, London

London George Routledge And Sons

Broadway, Ludgate Hill

New York: 9 Lafayette Place

1884

INTRODUCTION.

Sir Walter Scott's "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" were his
contribution to a series of books, published by John Murray, which
appeared between the years 1829 and 1847, and formed a collection of
eighty volumes known as "Murray's Family Library." The series was
planned to secure a wide diffusion of good literature in cheap
five-shilling volumes, and Scott's "Letters," written and published in
1830, formed one of the earlier books in the collection.

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in
the autumn of 1826, and Charles Knight, who had then conceived a plan of
a National Library, was entrusted, in July, 1827, with the
superintendence of its publications. Its first treatises appeared in
sixpenny numbers, once a fortnight. Its "British Almanac" and "Companion
to the Almanac" first appeared at the beginning of 1829. Charles Knight
started also in that year his own "Library of Entertaining Knowledge."
John Murray's "Family Library" was then begun, and in the spring of
1832--the year of the Reform Bill--the advance of civilization by the
diffusion of good literature, through cheap journals as well as cheap
books, was sought by the establishment of "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal"
in the North, and in London of "The Penny Magazine."

In the autumn of that year, 1832, on the 21st of September, Sir Walter
Scott died. The first warning of death had come to him in February,
1830, with a stroke of apoplexy. He had been visited