ment. His best feelings and enjoyments would be dashed with
bitterness, suspicion, and terror, as he reflected that, though
uninvaded, yet these were at the mercy of malignant fellow-mortals,
leagued with more malignant spirits, the laws and limits of whose
operations were wholly undefinable.

"What must have been his feelings on whom the evil eye had
glared,--against whom the spell had been pronounced; on whom misfortunes
came thick and fast, by flood and field, at home and abroad, in business
and in pleasure; whose cattle died, whose crops were blighted, and about
whose bed and board, invisible, unwelcome, and mischievous guests held
their revels; who saw not in his calamities the results of ignorance and
error, to be averted by caution, nor the inflictions of Heaven to be
borne with resignation, but was the victim of a compact, in which his
disasters were part of the price paid by the powers of darkness for an
immortal soul! He who pined in consumption supposed that his own waxen
effigy was revolving and melting at the charmed fire; the changes of his
sensations told him when wanton cruelty damped the flame, to waste it
lingeringly, or roused it in the impatience of revenge: and when came
those sharp and shooting pains, the hags were thrusting in their
bodkins, and their laugh rang in his ears: they sat upon his breast
asleep,--he awoke gasping, and, as he started up, he saw them melting
into air. Yet more miserable was the wight whom the fiends were
commissioned bodily to possess;--with whose breathing frame an infernal
substance was incorporate and almost identified;--whose thoughts were
sufferings, and his words involuntary blasphemies. Can we wonder that
all this was not borne passively;--that its authors were hunted out,
even, if needful, by their own charms;--that suspicion grew into
conviction, and conviction demanded vengeance;--that it was deemed a
duty to hold them up to public hatred, and drag them to the bar of
public justice;--and that their blood was eagerly thirsted after, of
which the shedding was often believed not merely a righteous
retribution, but the only efficient relief for the sufferers?

"The notion of witchcraft was no innocent and romantic superstition, no
scion of an elegant mythology, but was altogether vulgar, repulsive,
bloody, and loathsome. It was a foul ulcer on the face of humanity.
Other vagaries of the mind have been associated with lofty or with
gentle feelings;--they have belon