earlier days, together perhaps with some strength of conviction of the moral hideousness of the evil he was intended, in a rough way, to typify; but this hazily retained impression of the Author of Evil was the universal and entirely credited conception of the ordinary appearance of those bad spirits who were so real to our ancestors of Elizabethan days.  “Some are so carnallie minded,” says Scot, “that a spirit is no sooner spoken of, but they thinke of a blacke man with cloven feet, a paire of hornes, a taile, and eies as big as a bason."[1] Scot, however, was one of a very small minority in his opinion as to the carnal-mindedness of such a belief.  He in his day, like those in every age and country who dare to hold convictions opposed to the creed of the majority, was a dangerous sceptic; his book was publicly burnt by the common hangman;[2] and not long afterwards a royal author wrote a treatise “against the damnable doctrines of two principally in our age; whereof the one, called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so mainteines the old error of the Sadducees in denying of spirits."[3] The abandoned impudence of the man!—­and the logic of his royal opponent!

[Footnote 1:  p. 507.  See also Hutchinson, Essay on Witchcraft, p. 13; and Harsnet, p. 71.]

[Footnote 2:  Bayle, ix. 152.]

[Footnote 3:  James I., Daemonologie.  Edinburgh, 1597.]

41.  Spenser has clothed with horror this conception of the appearance of a fiend, just as he has enshrined in beauty the belief in the guardian angel.  It is worthy of remark that he describes the devil as dwelling beneath the altar of an idol in a heathen temple.  Prince Arthur strikes the image thrice with his sword—­

      “And the third time, out of an hidden shade,
      There forth issewed from under th’ altar’s smoake
      A dreadfull feend with fowle deformed looke,
      That stretched itselfe as it had long lyen still;
      And her long taile and fethers strongly shooke,
      That all the temple did with terrour fill;
    Yet him nought terrifide that feared nothing ill.

      “An huge great beast it was, when it in length
      Was stretched forth, that nigh filled all the place,
      And seemed to be of infinite great strength;
      Horrible, hideous, and of hellish race,
      Borne of the brooding of Echidna base,
      Or other like infernall Furies kinde,
      For of a maide she had the outward face
      To hide the horrour which did lurke behinde
    The better to beguile whom she so fond did finde.

      “Thereto the body of a dog she had,
      Full of fell ravin and fierce greedinesse;
      A lion’s clawes, with power and rigour clad
      To rende and teare whatso she can oppresse;
      A dragon’s taile, whose sting without redresse
      Full deadly wounds whereso it is empight,
      And eagle’s wings for scope and speedinesse
      That nothing may escape her reaching might,
    Whereto she ever list to make her hardy flight.”