m.

But the English king was warned by an angel in a dream of the intended
stratagem, and the colt was, by the celestial mandate, previously to the
combat, conjured in the holy name to be obedient to his rider during the
encounter. The fiend-horse intimated his submission by drooping his
head, but his word was not entirely credited. His ears were stopped with
wax. In this condition, Richard, armed at all points and with various
marks of his religious faith displayed on his weapons, rode forth to
meet Saladin, and the Soldan, confident of his stratagem, encountered
him boldly. The mare neighed till she shook the ground for miles around;
but the sucking devil, whom the wax prevented from hearing the summons,
could not obey the signal. Saladin was dismounted, and narrowly escaped
death, while his army were cut to pieces by the Christians. It is but an
awkward tale of wonder where a demon is worsted by a trick which could
hardly have cheated a common horse-jockey; but by such legends our
ancestors were amused and interested, till their belief respecting the
demons of the Holy Land seems to have been not very far different from
that expressed in the title of Ben Jonson's play, "The Devil is an Ass."

One of the earliest maps ever published, which appeared at Rome in the
sixteenth century, intimates a similar belief in the connexion of the
heathen nations of the north of Europe with the demons of the spiritual
world. In Esthonia, Lithuania, Courland, and such districts, the chart,
for want, it may be supposed, of an accurate account of the country,
exhibits rude cuts of the fur-clad natives paying homage at the shrines
of demons, who make themselves visibly present to them; while at other
places they are displayed as doing battle with the Teutonic knights, or
other military associations formed for the conversion or expulsion of
the heathens in these parts. Amid the pagans, armed with scimitars and
dressed in caftans, the fiends are painted as assisting them, pourtrayed
in all the modern horrors of the cloven foot, or, as the Germans term
it, horse's foot, bat wings, saucer eyes, locks like serpents, and tail
like a dragon. These attributes, it may be cursorily noticed, themselves
intimate the connexion of modern demonology with the mythology of the
ancients. The cloven foot is the attribute of Pan--to whose talents for
inspiring terror we owe the word _panic_--the snaky tresses are borrowed
from the shield of Minerva, and the