Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predestForsyth, J. S.
History
Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predest
Forsyth, J. S.
Demonology; Superstition; Witchcraft
This story must be accounted for some way or other; or belief in the
appearance of the apparitions must be credited. Either the miller
himself was the murderer, or he was privy to it, unperceived by the
actual perpetrators; or he might be an accomplice before the fact, or
at the time it was committed, but without having inflicted any of the
wounds. The compunctious visitings of his troubled conscience, the
dread of the law in the event of the disclosure, coming from any one
but himself, doubtless made him resolve to disburthen his guilty mind;
and pretended supernatural agency was the fittest channel that
presented itself for the occasion. That Walker and Sharp never
confessed any thing, ought not to be matter of wonder. There was no
evidence against them but the miller’s apparition, which, they were
well assured, would not be likely to appear against them; they were
determined therefore not to implicate themselves; well knowing, that
however the case stood, Graime the miller could not be convicted,
because, in the event of his story of the apparition being rejected,
they must be acquitted, although suspicion and the circumstances of
the pregnancy, &c. were against them; and again, if the miller had
declared himself, after this, as evidence for the crown, his
testimony, if taken at all, would be received with the greatest
caution and distrust; the result might, in fact, have been, that the
strongest suspicions would have fallen upon him as the real murderer
of Anne Clarke; for which, under every consideration of the case, he
might not unjustly have been tried, condemned, and executed. The
statement of Lumley proves nothing that was not generally known. That
Anne Clarke was murdered was well known, but by whom nobody ever knew.
She afterwards appeared to the miller; and why to the miller in
preference to any one else, unless he had had the least hand in it?
and with the exception of Sharp and Walker, the only living being who
was thoroughly acquainted with the catastrophe, but who himself was,
in fact, as guilty as either of the other two.
The Mr. Fanhair, who swore he saw “the likeness of a child standing
upon Walker’s shoulders” during the trial, ought to have been freely
blooded, cupped, purged, and dieted, for a month or two, until the
vapours of his infantile imagination had learned to condense
themselves within their proper focus: then, and then only, might his
oath have been listened to. Besides, the _child_ could only be a
fœtus, at what period of gestation we are not told, and to have
appeared in proper form, it ought to have had its principal appendage
with it—the mother. The two, however, might have been two heavy for
Walker’s shoulders: nevertheless, the gallantry of the times,
certainly, would not have refused her a seat in the dock alongside her
guilty paramour; or a chair in the witness’-box, if she came to appear
as evidence against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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