ge seems clearly to
prove that the belief in Robin Goodfellow and his fairy companions was
now out of date; while that as to witchcraft, as was afterwards but too
well shown, kept its ground against argument and controversy, and
survived "to shed more blood."

[Footnote 46: Reginald Scot's "Discovery of Witchcraft," book vii. chap,
ii.]

We are then to take leave of this fascinating article of the popular
creed, having in it so much of interest to the imagination that we
almost envy the credulity of those who, in the gentle moonlight of a
summer night in England, amid the tangled glades of a deep forest, or
the turfy swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the
fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is in vain to regret
illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity yield their place
before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the advance of morn.
These superstitions have already survived their best and most useful
purpose, having been embalmed in the poetry of Milton and of
Shakespeare, as well as writers only inferior to these great names. Of
Spenser we must say nothing, because in his "Faery Queen" the title is
the only circumstance which connects his splendid allegory with the
popular superstition, and, as he uses it, means nothing more than an
Utopia or nameless country.

With the fairy popular creed fell, doubtless, many subordinate articles
of credulity in England, but the belief in witches kept its ground. It
was rooted in the minds of the common people, as well by the easy
solution it afforded of much which they found otherwise hard to explain,
as in reverence to the Holy Scriptures, in which the word _witch,_ being
used in several places, conveyed to those who did not trouble themselves
about the nicety of the translation from the Eastern tongues, the
inference that the same species of witches were meant as those against
whom modern legislation had, in most European nations, directed the
punishment of death. These two circumstances furnished the numerous
believers in witchcraft with arguments in divinity and law which they
conceived irrefragable. They might say to the theologist, Will you not
believe in witches? the Scriptures aver their existence;--to the
jurisconsult, Will you dispute the existence of a crime against which
our own statute-book, and the code of almost all civilized countries,
have attested, by laws upon which hundreds and thousands have been
convicted, many or