A 3.  SECOND IMPRIMATUR:  “Edward Bromley.  I took upon mee to reuise and correct it.”] This revision by the judge who presided at the trial gives a singular and unique value and authority to the work.  We have no other report of any witch trial which has an equal stamp of authenticity.  How many of the rhetorical flourishes interspersed in the book are the property of Thomas Potts, Esquier, and how many are the interpolation of the “excellent care” of the worthy Baron, it is scarcely worth while to investigate.  Certainly never were judge and clerk more admirably paired.  The Shallow on the bench was well reflected in the Master Slender below.

B a. “The number of them being knowen to exceed all others at any time heretofore at one time to be indicted, arraigned, and receiue their tryall.”] Probably this was the case, at least in England; but a greater number had been convicted before, even in this country, at one time, than were found guilty on this occasion, as it appears from Scot, (Discovery of Witchcraft, page 543, edition 1584,) that seventeen or eighteen witches were condemned at once, at St. Osith, in Essex, in 1576, of whom an account was written by Brian Darcy, with the names and colours of their spirits.

B b. “She was a very old woman, about the age of fourescore.”] Dr. Henry More would have styled old Demdike “An eximious example of Moses, his Mecassephah, the word which he uses in that law,—­Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  Margaret Agar and Julian Cox, (see Glanvill’s Collection of Relations, p. 135, edition 1682,) on whom he dwells with such delighted interest, were very inferior subjects to what, in his hands, Elizabeth Sothernes would have made.  They had neither of them the finishing attribute of blindness, so fearful in a witch, to complete the sketch; nor such a fine foreground for the painting as the forest of Pendle presented; nor the advantage, for grouping, of a family of descendants in which witchcraft might be transmitted to the third generation.

B 2 a. “Roger Nowell, Esquire.”] This busy and mischievous personage who resided at Read Hall, in the immediate neighbourhood of Pendle, was sheriff of Lancashire in 1610.  He married Katherine, daughter of John Murton, of Murton, and was buried at Whalley, January 31st, 1623.  He was of the same family as Alexander Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul’s, and Lawrence Nowell, the restorer of Saxon literature in England; and tarnished a name which they had rendered memorable, by becoming, apparently, an eager and willing instrument in that wicked persecution which resulted in the present trial.  His ill-directed activity seems to have fanned the dormant embers into a blaze, and to have given aim and consistency to the whole scheme of oppression.  From this man was descended, in the female line, one whose merits might atone for a whole generation of Roger Nowells, the truly noble-minded and evangelical Reginald Heber.