The renowned Saladin, it is said, had dispatched an embassy to King Richard, with the present of a colt recommended as a gallant war-horse, challenging Coeur de Lion to meet him in single combat between the armies, for the purpose of deciding at once their pretensions to the land of Palestine, and the theological question whether the God of the Christians, or Jupiter, the deity of the Saracens, should be the future object of adoration by the subjects of both monarchs.  Now, under this seemingly chivalrous defiance was concealed a most unknightly stratagem, and which we may at the same time call a very clumsy trick for the devil to be concerned in.  A Saracen clerk had conjured two devils into a mare and her colt, with the instruction, that whenever the mare neighed, the foal, which was a brute of uncommon size, should kneel down to suck his dam.  The enchanted foal was sent to King Richard in the belief that the foal, obeying the signal of its dam as usual, the Soldan who mounted the mare might get an easy advantage over him.

But the English king was warned by an angel in a dream of the intended stratagem, and the colt was, by the celestial mandate, previously to the combat, conjured in the holy name to be obedient to his rider during the encounter.  The fiend-horse intimated his submission by drooping his head, but his word was not entirely credited.  His ears were stopped with wax.  In this condition, Richard, armed at all points and with various marks of his religious faith displayed on his weapons, rode forth to meet Saladin, and the Soldan, confident of his stratagem, encountered him boldly.  The mare neighed till she shook the ground for miles around; but the sucking devil, whom the wax prevented from hearing the summons, could not obey the signal.  Saladin was dismounted, and narrowly escaped death, while his army were cut to pieces by the Christians.  It is but an awkward tale of wonder where a demon is worsted by a trick which could hardly have cheated a common horse-jockey; but by such legends our ancestors were amused and interested, till their belief respecting the demons of the Holy Land seems to have been not very far different from that expressed in the title of Ben Jonson’s play, “The Devil is an Ass.”

One of the earliest maps ever published, which appeared at Rome in the sixteenth century, intimates a similar belief in the connexion of the heathen nations of the north of Europe with the demons of the spiritual world.  In Esthonia, Lithuania, Courland, and such districts, the chart, for want, it may be supposed, of an accurate account of the country, exhibits rude cuts of the fur-clad natives paying homage at the shrines of demons, who make themselves visibly present to them; while at other places they are displayed as doing battle with the Teutonic knights, or other military associations formed for the conversion or expulsion of the heathens in these parts.  Amid the pagans, armed with scimitars and dressed in caftans, the fiends