taken and put to the torture, they confessed
that if their cooking had been finished, a great
frost would have come over the land with
ice, and all the fruit would have been
nipped." The whole story may be true,
except that the kettle of these two poor
witches contained harmless meat.

Luther used to tell of two women who
went to an inn, and put aside two jars of
water. While so doing they were heard to
debate with themselves whether they would
touch the bread or the wine, the corn or the
grapes. When the landlord, who stood by
in a corner, heard that, he took both the
pitchers, and when the two women were in
bed, poured the contents over them. The
water became ice, and from that hour the
women fell sick, so that they died of it.
That story also may be true. The poor
wretches had discussed together very likely
what they would eat or drink at the inn;
for which crime they were drenched at
midnight, during frosty weather, and perished,
as tens of thousands perished, in their homes
or at the scaffold—victims of superstition.

Then there were some people—especially
old women—who had the evil eye; whose
looks were poisonous to man, and beast, and
field. The Greeks used to believe this of
some inhabitants of Pontus, who were said to
have two pupils in each eye, or the image of
a horse in one.

There was a belief also that people could
be, not "damned with faint praise," but
cursed by too much flattery. In some
respects, that would be a wholesome notion.
It is like a superstition still current, that
if you boast of a thing, you are sure to lose
it. The belief in cursing by loud praise dates
as far back as the time of Plautus, and both
Greeks and Romans had a special word
prefixed very commonly to high praise, when it
was designed to guard against the idea that
a curse might be intended or drawn down
by it. This notion existed through many
centuries; and even our distrust of a man
who "does not look you in the face," though
it has grounds of a reasonable kind to stand
upon, may yet be strengthened by a relic of
the old dread that an evil charm was being
worked by any one who, while he addressed
another, looked either up into the sky, or
down towards the earth.

We now talk pleasantly of true
loveknots; such things used to be charms to
attract love, worn round the arm or knee;
and there were knots that destroyed love,
used by enemies, to render married people
childless. Charms spoken on the threshold
in the marriage hour were also supposed to
prevent the birth of children; and Paracelsus
states what must be done to counteract such
charms.

I must say little of the belief that disease
was caused by the practice of some witch
upon the waxen image of the patient.  Duff,
King of Scotland, had a disease that,
legendary as it is, may readily be recognised
as consumption, with great fever and night
sweats when he went to bed. Physicians
did him no good, Then there was a great
rumour that the King of Moravia was
plagued by the Scottish witches in the
neighbourhood of Forres. Macbeth knew
Forres for a witch neighbourhood, and in this
legend we find that it really used to be so
reputed. King Duff ordered research to be
made on his own account, and the busy
magistrate of Forres at last contrived one
night to break into a house where an old
witch and a young one were roasting a
waxen image of the king upon a spit before
a low fire. The slow melting of the wax all
night was the cause of the king's night
sweats and of his wasting; the heat of the
fire caused his fever. After these women had
been burnt the king recovered.

I will add only one fact concerning witches.
It was in most places either an understood
fact or a direct injunction to their judges,
that these women, when under sentence to be
burnt or tortured, were enabled by the devil
to give utterance to peculiarly heartrending
cries, and to plead for pity in tones to which
it was dangerous to listen; that the judge
must be forewarned of this, and that if he
was deluded, and shrank from duty, in his
struggle against the Evil One, he would be
made answerable for such relentings as for a
very grave offence. Superstition steeled the
heart thus against even the best impulse of
humanity.

When ignorance was the rule, men who
were wiser than the world about them, if
they produced any wonderful results of
knowledge, were supposed to be magicians.
In many cases they fell in with the prevailing
error, and as they found it hard to
obtain credit for what they were, and easy to
get renown and influence by letting
themselves be considered what they were not, they
accepted the title of magicians, and said and
did things to maintain them in that repute,
for magicians generally were respected, and
not burnt. The belief in them had already
become very faint when the belief in witches
had attained its worst development.

The most famous of the legendary
enchanters were our own Merlin, and Virgil
the poet. Of Merlin we know much. We
have all heard of the round table made
by him for King Arthur, before which the
twelfth (or Judas) seat was so constructed
that whoever sat upon it went down to
perdition. Merlin was, on the whole, very
beneficent, and did not deserve that he should
have his own arts fatally practised upon
himself by the hard-hearted lady to whom he
taught them. Virgil was more known by
the Italians of the middle ages as enchanter
than as poet. It is odd that he should have
so survived. A thick book might be filled
with the legends told about him. He built
Naples upon eggs; lapse of time may,