"Ravaillac Redivivus," written with the unjust
purpose of attaching to the religious sect to which the wizard and
assassin belonged the charge of having fostered and encouraged the
crimes they committed or attempted.

It is certain that no story of witchcraft or necromancy, so many of
which occurred near and in Edinburgh, made such a lasting impression on
the public mind as that of Major Weir. The remains of the house in which
he and his sister lived are still shown at the head of the West Bow,
which has a gloomy aspect, well suited for a necromancer. It was at
different times a brazier's shop and a magazine for lint, and in my
younger days was employed for the latter use; but no family would
inhabit the haunted walls as a residence; and bold was the urchin from
the High School who dared approach the gloomy ruin at the risk of seeing
the Major's enchanted staff parading through the old apartments, or
hearing the hum of the necromantic wheel, which procured for his sister
such a character as a spinner. At the time I am writing this last
fortress of superstitious renown is in the course of being destroyed, in
order to the modern improvements now carrying on in a quarter long
thought unimprovable.

As knowledge and learning began to increase, the gentlemen and clergy of
Scotland became ashamed of the credulity of their ancestors, and witch
trials, although not discontinued, more seldom disgrace our records of
criminal jurisprudence.

Sir John Clerk, a scholar and an antiquary, the grandfather of the late
celebrated John Clerk of Eldin, had the honour to be amongst the first
to decline acting as a commissioner on the trial of a witch, to which he
was appointed so early as 1678,[81] alleging, drily, that he did not
feel himself warlock (that is, conjurer) sufficient to be a judge upon
such an inquisition. Allan Ramsay, his friend, and who must be supposed
to speak the sense of his many respectable patrons, had delivered his
opinion on the subject in the "Gentle Shepherd," where Mause's imaginary
witchcraft constitutes the machinery of the poem.

[Footnote 81: See Fountainhall's "Decisions," vol. i. p. 15.]

Yet these dawnings of sense and humanity were obscured by the clouds of
the ancient superstition on more than one distinguished occasion. In
1676, Sir George Maxwell, of Pollock, apparently a man of melancholic
and valetudinary habits, believed himself bewitched to death by six
witches, one man and five women, who we