to read more plainlie his voice so failed him as he could scantly be heard at all." The vicar had asthma, which might well have ac counted for it, but of course it was all the doing of the witch. If this sort of evidence, the imagination of the parties affected, were allowed, no person, as Sergeant Kelynge justly observed, would be safe. In one of the most curious of the old books on this subject, "The discovery [i. e., the exposure] of Witch craft," dedicated to Sir Roger Manwood, Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer under Elizabeth,1 the author, Scott, pro tests against the credulity on this subject, and the too lightly receiving of evidence of witchcraft; much so-called witchcraft was merely conjuring. The ideas about " Incu bus" he dubs " flat knavery." Nevertheless, with a charming inconsistency, this anti-wiz ard gives us the forms of conjuration for knowing what is spoken of us behind our backs, for obtaining a woman's love, for find ing out a " theefe," for hurting with images of wax. Very silly it all seems now; but who can be wiser than his age? " We are too hasty," says Charles Lamb, " when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness or proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely from the pal1 These were nice questions for the lawyers, too. Bodman reported that one confessed that he went out, or rather up, into the air, and was transported manie miles to the fairies danse, onelie because he would spie unto what place his wife went hagging and how she be haved her selfe. Whereupon was much ado among the inquisitors and lawyers to discusse whether he should be executed with his wife or no. But it was concluded that he must die, because he bewraied not his wife, the which he forbare to do propter reventisio honoris et familic.
pable absurd — could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony? That maidens pined away, wast ing inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire; that corn was lodged and cattle lamed; that whirlwinds upstore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest, or the spits and kettles danced a fearful innocerit vagary about some rustic kitchen when no wind was stirring, were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness passing by the flower and pomp of the earth should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld, has neither likelihood nor unlikehood d priori to us who have no measure to guess at his policy or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market." If Lamb had, however, dipped into the pages of Scott's " Discovery" he would have known why — according to Vairus — women are oftener found to be witches than men. It is their "unbridled force of furie, women having a marvellous fickle nature, what greefe soever happeneth unto them immediately all peaceableness of mind departeth, and they are so troubled with evil humours that out go their venomous exhalations." The neurotic woman is evi dently not entirely a product of the nine teenth century. The Canon Law again! This is one of the subjects on which the library is strongest, and it owes its strength in this department, as well as in the Civil Law, to the munificent bequest of Lord Stowell, expended under judicious advice. The works on the Canon Law number one hundred and forty-one, many of them huge folios, marvels of me diaeval erudition. There is, for instance, the "Corpus Juris Canonici" of Joannes Petrus Gibert, a vast reservoir of ecclesiastical au thorities, mirrowing the mind of the mediaeval church, its good and evil, its beauty and its
