red the crucifix
and denied their salvation; others of having absconded to keep the
Devil's Sabbath, in spite of bolts and bars; others of having merely
joined in the choral dances around the witches' tree of rendezvous.
Several of their husbands and relatives swore that they were in bed and
asleep during these pretended excursions. Alciatus recommended gentle
and temperate measures; and the minds of the country became at length
composed.[50]

[Footnote 50: Alciat. "Parerg. Juris," lib. viii. chap. 22.]

In 1488, the country four leagues around Constance was laid waste by
lightning and tempest, and two women being, by fair means or foul, made
to confess themselves guilty as the cause of the devastation, suffered
death.

About 1515, 500 persons were executed at Geneva, under the character of
"Protestant witches," from which we may suppose many suffered for
heresy. Forty-eight witches were burnt at Ravensburgh within four years,
as Hutchison reports, on the authority of Mengho, the author of the
"Malleus Malleficarum." In Lorraine the learned inquisitor, Remigius,
boasts that he put to death 900 people in fifteen years. As many were
banished from that country, so that whole towns were on the point of
becoming desolate. In 1524, 1,000 persons were put to death in one year
at Como, in Italy, and about 100 every year after for several years.[51]

[Footnote 51: Bart. de Spina, de Strigilibus.]

In the beginning of the next century the persecution of witches broke
out in France with a fury which was hardly conceivable, and multitudes
were burnt amid that gay and lively people. Some notion of the extreme
prejudice of their judges may be drawn from the words of one of the
inquisitors themselves. Pierre de Lancre, royal councillor in the
Parliament of Bourdeaux, with whom the President Espaignel was joined in
a commission to enquire into certain acts of sorcery, reported to have
been committed in Labourt and its neighbourhood, at the foot of the
Pyrenees, about the month of May, 1619. A few extracts from the preface
will best evince the state of mind in which he proceeded to the
discharge of his commission.

His story assumes the form of a narrative of a direct war between Satan
on the one side and the Royal Commissioners on the other, "because,"
says Councillor de Lancre, with self-complaisance, "nothing is so
calculated to strike terror into the fiend and his dominions as a
commission with such plenary powers."

At fir