ilty
upon the indictment of conversing with the devil in the shape of a cat?
The sapient foreman very gravely answered, "We find her guilty of
that." The learned judge then very reluctantly proceeded to pass
sentence of death; but, by his persevering exertions, a pardon was at
last obtained, and the wretched old woman was set at liberty. In the
year 1716, a woman and her daughter,--the latter only nine years of
age,--were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil,
and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings and making a lather
of soap. This appears to have been the last judicial execution in
England. From that time to the year 1736, the populace raised at
intervals the old cry, and more than once endangered the lives of poor
women by dragging them through ponds on suspicion; but the philosophy
of those who, from their position, sooner or later give the tone to the
opinions and morals of the poor, was silently working a cure for the
evil. The fear of witches ceased to be epidemic, and became individual,
lingering only in minds lettered by inveterate prejudice or brutalizing
superstition. In the year 1736, the penal statute of James I. was
finally blotted from the statutebook, and suffered no longer to
disgrace the advancing intelligence of the country. Pretenders to
witchcraft, fortune-tellers, conjurors, and all their train, were
liable only to the common punishment of rogues and
impostors--imprisonment and the pillory.

In Scotland, the delusion also assumed the same phases, and was
gradually extinguished in the light of civilization. As in England the
progress of improvement was slow. Up to the year 1665, little or no
diminution of the mania was perceptible. In 1643, the General Assembly
recommended that the Privy Council should institute a standing
commission, composed of any "understanding gentlemen or magistrates,"
to try the witches, who were stated to have increased enormously of
late years. In 1649, an act was passed, confirmatory of the original
statute of Queen Mary, explaining some points of the latter which were
doubtful, and enacting severe penalties, not only against witches
themselves, but against all who covenanted with them, or sought by
their means to pry into the secrets of futurity, or cause any evil to
the life, lands, or limbs of their neighbours. For the next ten years,
the popular madness upon this subject was perhaps more furious than
ever; upwards of four thousand perso