the usual functions of a wolf, and was attended in his course by one larger, which he supposed the Lord of the Forest himself.  These wolves, he said, ravaged the flocks, and throttled the dogs which stood in their defence.  If either had not seen the other, he howled, after the manner of the animal, to call his comrade to his share of the prey; if he did not come upon this signal, he proceeded to bury it the best way he could.

Such was the general persecution under Messieurs Espiagnel and De Lancre.  Many similar scenes occurred in France, till the edict of Louis XIV. discharging all future prosecutions for witchcraft, after which the crime itself was heard of no more.[52]

[Footnote 52:  The reader may sup full on such wild horrors in the causes celebres.]

While the spirit of superstition was working such horrors in France, it was not, we may believe, more idle in other countries of Europe.  In Spain, particularly, long the residence of the Moors, a people putting deep faith in all the day-dreams of witchcraft, good and evil genii, spells and talismans, the ardent and devotional temper of the old Christians dictated a severe research after sorcerers as well as heretics, and relapsed Jews or Mahommedans.  In former times, during the subsistence of the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, a school was supposed to be kept open in Toboso for the study, it is said, of magic, but more likely of chemistry, algebra, and other sciences, which, altogether mistaken by the ignorant and vulgar, and imperfectly understood even by those who studied them, were supposed to be allied to necromancy, or at least to natural magic.  It was, of course, the business of the Inquisition to purify whatever such pursuits had left of suspicious Catholicism, and their labours cost as much blood on accusations of witchcraft and magic as for heresy and relapse.

Even the colder nations of Europe were subject to the same epidemic terror for witchcraft, and a specimen of it was exhibited in the sober and rational country of Sweden about the middle of last century, an account of which, being translated into English by a respectable clergyman, Doctor Horneck, excited general surprise how a whole people could be imposed upon to the degree of shedding much blood, and committing great cruelty and injustice, on account of the idle falsehoods propagated by a crew of lying children, who in this case were both actors and witnesses.

The melancholy truth that “the human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” is by nothing proved so strongly as by the imperfect sense displayed by children of the sanctity of moral truth.  Both the gentlemen and the mass of the people, as they advance in years, learn to despise and avoid falsehood; the former out of pride, and from a remaining feeling, derived from the days of chivalry, that the character of a liar is a deadly stain on their honour; the other, from some general reflection upon the necessity of preserving a character