without any of its engaging properties, appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and superstition and only strong in oppression.  If we turn from the common herd to the luminaries of the age, to those whose works are the landmarks of literature and science, the reference is equally disappointing;—­

    “The sun itself is dark
    And silent as the moon
    Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.”

[Footnote 1:  Take, as an instance, the children of Mr. Throgmorton, of Warbois, for bewitching whom, Mother Samuels, her husband, and daughter, suffered in 1593.  No veteran professors “in the art of ingeniously tormenting” could have administered the question with more consummate skill than these little incarnate fiends, till the poor old woman was actually induced, from their confident asseverations and plausible counterfeiting, to believe at last that she had been a witch all her life without knowing it.  She made a confession, following the story which they had prompted, on their assurances that it was the only means to restore them, and then was hanged upon that confession, to which she adhered on the scaffold.  Few tracts present a more vivid picture of manners than that in which the account of this case of witchcraft is contained.  It is perhaps the rarest of the English tracts relating to witchcraft, and is entitled “The most strange and admirable Discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys, arraigned, convicted, and executed at the last Assizes at Huntingdon, for the bewitching of the five daughters of Robert Throckmorton, Esquire, and divers other persons with sundrie Devilish and grievous torments.  And also for the bewitching to Death of the Lady Crumwell, the like hath not been heard of in this age.  London, Printed by the Widdowe Orwin for Thomas Man and John Winnington, and are to be sold in Paternoster Rowe at the Signe of the Talbot.” 1593, 4to.  My copy was Brand’s, and formed Lot 8224 in his Sale Catalogue.]

We find the illustrious author of the Novum Organon sacrificing to courtly suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing the ingredients for a witches’ ointment;[2]—­Raleigh, adopting miserable fallacies at second hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]—­Selden, maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]—­The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;[6]—­Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch it;[7]—­The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels