WITCHCRAFT AND OLD BOGUEY.

THE public have recently learnt, from some
communications which have been made to the
Times newspaper, that a belief in witchcraft
still prevails amongst the rural population of
England. This intimation is not altogether a
novelty, for the circumstances attendant upon
the trial of the poisoner Dove, in the course
of last year, must be fresh in everybody's
recollection; and, indeed, very few assizes go
by without affording some evidence of the
fact. When, however, we find that such a
belief is not confined to isolated cases, but is
scattered broadcast over a whole district, it
becomes the duty of all who have the education
of the people at heart to lend their aid
in endeavouring to extirpate a superstition
as ridiculous as it is degrading. Amongst the
means to be employed for this object, the
least effective may not, perhaps, be those
which demonstrate the absurd practices of
witchcraft, and tend to show upon what
slight and irrelevant grounds accusations of
sorcery were preferred.

The ordinances against witchcraft were in
full force all over Europe at the commencement
of the seventeenth century. There flourished
in France, at that date—that is to say, in the
year sixteen hundred and one—a person who
exercised high judicial authority in the
province of Burgundy, whose especial vocation
it was, like that of our own Matthew
Hopkins, to find out and bring to trial all who
were tainted with the crime of sorcery.
This gentleman's name was Boguet, and—as
he was such a terror to the common people—
it is very probable we shall not wrong his
fame in supposing that he was the original of
the redoubtable Boguey who affrighted our
own infancy. It would seem, not only from
the revelations of the Sieur Boguet himself,
but from the general statistics of witchcraft
in France, that he had plenty of work on his
hands; for while he was yet a young man, in
the reign of Henry the Third, it was
estimated that there were not fewer than a
hundred thousand sorcerers in different parts
of the country, as many as thirty thousand
having been expelled from Paris alone during
the life-time of Henry's brother, Charles the
Ninth, of pious memory. Sorcerers swarmed,
in short, in every town, in every village, in every hamlet,
until it became a very difficult
thing to say who was a sorcerer and who was
not. Every accident that happened, no
matter how intelligible the cause, was
ascribed to the malefic influence of sorcery. A
hailstorm that beat down the corn, a river
that overflowed its banks, a fire that burnt
down a cottage, a murrain that raged a
farmyard, a casual personal injury or sickness—
anything and everything that appertains to
the common lot of suffering, was at once
ascribed to witchcraft. It was something, the
ignorant multitude thought, to revenge the
misfortune by which they were visited on
others—a simple accusation sufficed, and the
annals of the law show that it was not often
withheld. Under these circumstances, the
Sieur Boguet, as I have already intimated,
found quite enough to do. That he did not
eat the bread of idleness is abundantly
manifest in the works he published. They
are comprised in a thickish octavo volume of
some four or five hundred pages, the one I
have studied being the Lyons edition of the
year sixteen hundred and eight: a rare book,
as the family of the Sieur Boguet (on whom
happily descended the enlightenment of which
he was deprived) did their utmost to
suppress every copy.

If an author's reputation could be
established by a prefatory sonnet—that one-sided
criticism which existed when reviews were
not—then the Sieur Boguet's fame must
remain uncontested; for a notable witness to
it, one Chassiguet, declares (in verse of the
most execrable description) that Boguet is at
once " a learned Orpheus in the dance of the
Muses," " a Bellerophon who combats the
Prince of Darkness with his pen," and " a
Hercules who by his writings at once cuts off
the seven heads of the infernal Hydra of
sorcery." But the Sieur Boguet's reward
was not, as some of his admirers held, of this
world only ; another worshipper of his genius,
Monsieur Gaspar du Pin, distinctly puts this
question: " If ancient Greece seated Alcides
amongst the gods for vanquishing the monsters
of earth, what place art thou (O Boguet)
to expect in having conquered Hell? " We
shall presently see what are the claims
of the erudite Boguet to rank with the
demigods of antiquity, but first of all we
must let him tell the story which furnishes