under circumstances so well suited to impress with awe and tenderness as when uttered by the calumniated, oppressed, and dying old man.  Baxter had been tried for sedition, on the ground that one of his publications contained a reflection upon Episcopacy, and was imprisoned for two years.  It is a striking and melancholy illustration of the moral infirmity of human nature, that the author of the “Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” and the “Call to the Unconverted,” permitted such a vengeful feeling against the Establishment to enter his breast, that he took pleasure, and almost exulted, in relating the fate of this innocent and aged clergyman, whom he denominates, in derision, a “Reading Parson.”

Baxter’s writings are pervaded by his belief in all sorts of supernatural things.  In the “Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” he declares his conviction of the reality and authenticity of stories of ghosts, apparitions, haunted houses, &c.  He placed full faith in a tale, current among the people of his day, of the “dispossession of the Devil out of many persons together in a room in Lancashire, at the prayer of some godly ministers.”  In his “Dying Thoughts,” he says, “I have had many convincing proofs of witches, the contracts they have made with devils, and the power which they have received from them;” and he seems to have credited the most absurd fables ever invented on the subject by ignorance, folly, or fraud.

The case to which he refers, as one of the “dispossession of devils,” may be found in a tract published in London in 1697, entitled, “The Surey Demoniac; or, an Account of Satan’s strange and dreadful actings, in and about the body of Richard Dugdale, of Surey, near Whalley, in Lancashire.  And how he was dispossessed by God’s blessing on the Fastings and Prayers of divers Ministers and People.  The matter of fact attested by the oaths of several creditable persons, before some of his Majestie’s Justices of the Peace in the said county.”  The “London Monthly Repository” (vol. v., 1810) describes the affair as follows:  “These dreadful actings of Satan continued above a year; during which there was a desperate struggle between him and nine ministers of the gospel, who had undertaken to cast him out, and, for that purpose, successively relieved each other in their daily combats with him:  while Satan tried all his arts to baffle their attempts, insulting them with scoffs and raillery, puzzling them sometimes with Greek and Latin, and threatening them with the effects of his vengeance, till he was finally vanquished and put to flight by the persevering prayers and fastings of the said ministers.”

No name in English history is regarded with more respect and admiration, by wise and virtuous men, than that of Sir Matthew Hale.  His character was almost venerated by our ancestors; and it has been thought that it was the influence of his authority, more than any thing else, that prevailed upon them to pursue the course they adopted in the prosecutions at Salem.  This great and good man presided, as Lord Chief Baron, at the trial of two females,—­Amy Dunny and Rose Cullender,—­at Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, in the year 1664.  They were convicted and executed.