During this whole century, there were trials and executions for witchcraft in all civilized countries.  More than two hundred were hanged in England, thousands were burned in Scotland, and still larger numbers in various parts of Europe.

Edward Fairfax, the poet, was one of the most accomplished men in England.  He is celebrated as the translator of Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” in allusion to which work Collins thus speaks of him:—­

    “How have I sate, while piped the pensive wind,
      To hear thy harp, by British Fairfax strung,
    Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind
      Believed the magic wonders that he sung.”

This same Fairfax prosecuted six of his neighbors for bewitching his children.  The trials took place about the time the first pilgrims came to America.

In 1634, Urbain Grandier, a very learned and eminent French minister, rendered himself odious to the bigoted nuns of Loudun, by his moderation towards heretics.  Secretly instigated, as has been supposed, by Cardinal Richelieu, against whom he had written a satire, they pretended to be bewitched by him, and procured his prosecution:  he was tortured upon the rack until he swooned, and then was burned at the stake.  In 1640, Dr. Lamb, of London, was murdered in the streets of that city by the mob, on suspicion of witchcraft.  Several were hanged in England, only a few years before the proceedings commenced in Salem.  Some were tried by water ordeal, and drowned in the process, in Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, and Northamptonshire, at the very time the executions were going on here; and a considerable number of capital punishments took place in various parts of Great Britain, some years after the prosecution had ceased in America.

The trials and executions in England and Scotland were attended by circumstances as painful, as barbarous, and in all respects as disgraceful, as those occurring in Salem.  Every species of torture seems to have been resorted to:  the principles of reason, justice, and humanity were set at defiance, and the whole body of the people kept in a state of the most fierce excitement against the sufferers.  Indeed, there is nothing more distressing in the contemplation of these sanguinary proceedings than the spirit of deliberate and unmitigated cruelty with which they were conducted.  No symptoms of pity, compassion, or sympathy, appear to have been manifested by the judges or the community.  The following account of the expenses attending the execution of two persons convicted of witchcraft in Scotland, shows in what a cool, business-like style the affair was managed:—­

“For ten loads of coal, to burn them L3 6 8 For a tar barrel 0 14 0 For towes 0 6 0 For hurden to be jumps for them 3 10 0 For making of them 0 8 0 For one to go to Finmouth for the Laird to sit
  upon their assize as judge 0 6 0
For the executioner for his pains 8 14 0 For his expenses here 0 16 4”