“In the Notes upon those Verses that I quoted out of Hudibras, it is said, that he had been a painful Preacher for many Years, I may add for Fifty, for so long he had been Vicar of Brandeston in the County of Suffolk, as appears by the Time of his Institution.  That I might know the present Sense of the Chief Inhabitants of that Place, I wrote to Mr. Wilson, the Incumbent of that Town, and by his Means received the following Letter from Mr. Rivett, a worthy Gentleman who lived lately in the same Place, and whose Father lived there before him.

“’SIR,

“’In Answer to your Request concerning Mr. Lowes, my Father was always of the opinion, that Mr. Lowes suffered wrongfully, and hath often said, that he did believe, he was no more a Wizzard than he was.  I have heard it from them that watched with him, that they kept him awake several Nights together, and run him backwards and forwards about the Room, until he was out of Breath:  Then they rested him a little, and then ran him again:  And thus they did for several Days and Nights together, till he was weary of his Life, and was scarce sensible of what he said or did.  They swam him at Framlingham, but that was no true Rule to try him by; for they put in honest People at the same Time, and they swam as well as he.”]

After the lapse of another half century, and at the very period when the persecution against witches waxed hotter, and the public prejudice had become only more inveterate, from the ingredient of fanaticism having been largely thrown in as a stimulant, another ally to the cause of compassion and common sense started up, in the person of one whose name has rounded many a period and given point to many an invective.  To find the proscribed author of the Patriarcha purging with “euphrasy and rue” the eyes of the dispensers of justice, and shouldering the crowd to obtain for reason a fair and impartial hearing, is indeed like meeting with Saul among the prophets.  If there be one name which has been doomed to run the gauntlet, and against which every pert and insolent political declaimer has had his fling, it is that of this unfortunate writer; yet in his short but masterly and unanswerable “Advertisement to the Jurymen of England, touching Witches, together with a difference between an English and Hebrew Witch,” first published in 1653, 4to., he has addressed himself so cogently and decisively to the main fallacy of the arguments in favour of witchcraft which rested their force on Scripture misunderstood, and has so pertinently and popularly urged the points to be considered, that his tract must have had the greatest weight on the class to whom his reasoning was principally addressed, and on whose fiat the fates of his unhappy clients may be said to have hung.  For this good service, reason and common sense owe Sir Robert Filmer a debt which does not yet appear to have been paid.  The verdict of proscription against him was pronounced by the most incompetent and superficial aera of our