To what prejudice against women are we to trace their sex having been chosen to represent the Furies, stern and inexorable ministers of Divine wrath; the Harpies, who defiled all they touched; the perilous Sirens; unless it be to woman's fascinations in youth, and envious bitterness in old age--the conventional type of witchcraft? This unhappy selection of woman for working _malefices_ has been attributed to the facility which the devil found in tempting Eve. A witch is supposed by the most learned in the black art to be in compact with Satan, whom she is obliged to obey; whereas a sorcerer commands the devil himself by his knowledge of charms and invocations, but more especially of perfumes that the evil spirits delight in when properly suffumigated, or abhor when maliciously given them to smell. Thus the burning of a fish's liver by Tobit drove the devil into the remote parts of Egypt; and Lilly informs us, that one Evans having raised a spirit at the request of Lord Bothwell and Sir Kenelm Digby, and forgotten his favourite fumigation or incense, the angry elf whipped him up, and carried him from his house in the Minories to Battersea Causeway. Although fairies are mostly considered juvenile, and many of their kind acts are recorded, yet are they in general mischievous imps; Mr. Lewis describes those he saw in the silver and lead mines of Wales, as only being about half a yard high. As a punishment for their vagaries, all their children are stunted and idiotic; and this accounts for their abominable custom of substituting their own "base elfin breed" for healthy infants. Hence are idiots commonly called changelings. Daemoniacs are prone to commit suicide, less from their loathing an irksome life than through fear, not of future torments, but of the renewal or the continuance of their worldly sufferings. Perhaps they may entertain some doubts as to the punishment of another existence, while their actual condition is intolerable; we not unfrequently see desperate men rushing to meet the very fate they dread.