C 4 b. “We want old Demdike, who dyed in the castle before she came to her tryall.”] Worn out most probably with her imprisonment, she having been committed in April, and the cruelties she had undergone, both before and after her commitment.  Master Nowell and Master Potts both wanted her, we may readily conceive, to fill up the miserable pageant; but she was gone where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.  With the exception of Alice Nutter, in whom interest is excited from very different grounds, Mother Demdike attracts attention in a higher degree than any other of these Pendle witches.  She was, beyond dispute, the Erictho of Pendle.  Mother Chattox was but second in rank.  There is something fearfully intense in the expression of the former,—­blind, on the last verge of the extreme limit of human existence, and mother of a line of witches,—­“that she would pray for the said Baldwin, both still and loud.”  She is introduced in Shadwell’s play, the Lancashire Witches, 1682, as a persona dramatis, along with Mother Dickinson and Mother Hargrave, two of the witches convicted in 1633, but without any regard to the characteristic circumstances under which she appears in the present narrative.  The following invocation, which is put into her mouth, is rather a favourable specimen of that play, certainly not one of the worst of Shadwell’s, in which there are many vigorous strokes, with an alloy of coarseness not unusual in his works, and some powerful conceptions of character: 

    Come, sisters, come, why do you stay? 
    Our business will not brook delay;
    The owl is flown from the hollow oak,
    From lakes and bogs the toads do croak;
    The foxes bark, the screech-owl screams,
    Wolves howl, bats fly, and the faint beams
    Of glow-worms light grows bright a-pace;
    The stars are fled, the moon hides her face. 
    The spindle now is turning round,
    Mandrakes are groaning under ground: 
    I’th’ hole i’th’ ditch (our nails have made)
    Now all our images are laid,
    Of wax and wooll, which we must prick,
    With needles urging to the quick. 
    Into the hole I’le poure a flood
    Of black lambs bloud, to make all good. 
    The lamb with nails and teeth wee’l tear. 
    Come, where’s the sacrifice? appear.

* * * * *

Oyntment for flying here I have,
Of childrens fat, stoln from the grave: 
The juice of smallage, and night-shade,
Of poplar leaves, and aconite, made
With these. 
The aromatic reed I boyl,
With water-parsnip and cinquefoil;
With store of soot, and add to that
The reeking blood of many a bat.

                  Lancashire Witches, pp. 10, 41.

One of the peculiarities of Shadwell’s play is the introduction of the Lancashire dialect, which he makes his clown Clod speak.  The subjoined extract may perhaps amuse my readers.  Collier would have enjoyed it: