From these opinions of the great we may turn to mark the more trivial indications of the shifting of opinion to be found in the pamphlet literature. It goes without saying that the pamphlet-writers believed in that whereof they spoke. It is not in their outspoken faith that we are interested, but rather in their mention of those opponents at whose numbers they marvelled, and whose incredulity they undertook to shake. Nowhere better than in the prefaces of the pamphleteers can evidence be found of the growing skepticism. The narrator of the Northampton cases in 1612 avowed it his purpose in writing to convince the "many that remaine yet in doubt whether there be any Witches or no."[73] That ardent busybody, Mr. Potts, who reported the Lancaster cases of 1612, very incidentally lets us know that the kinsfolk and friends of Jennet Preston, who, it will be remembered, suffered at York, declared the whole prosecution to be an act of malice.[74] The Yorkshire poet and gentleman, Edward Fairfax, who made such an ado about the sickness of his two daughters in 1622 and would have sent six creatures to the gallows for it, was very frank in describing the opposition he met. The accused women found supporters among the "best able and most understanding."[75] There were, he thought, three kinds of people who were doubters in these matters: those who attributed too much to natural causes and who were content to call clear cases of bewitchment convulsions, those who when witchcraft was broached talked about fairies and "walking ghosts," and lastly those who believed there were no witches. "Of this opinion I hear and see there be many, some of them men of worth, religious and honest."[76] The pamphlet-writers of James's reign had adjusted themselves to meet opposition. Those of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth were prepared to meet ridicule.[77] "There are some," says the narrator of a Yorkshire story, "who are of opinion that there are no Divells nor any witches.... Men in this Age are grown so wicked, that they are apt to believe there are no greater Divells than themselves."[78] Another writer, to bolster up his story before a skeptical public, declares that he is "very chary and hard enough to believe passages of this nature."[79]