The trial of the Samlesbury witches, Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley, and Jane Southworth, forms a curious episode in Potts's _Discoverie_. A Priest or Jesuit, of the name of Thomson, _alias_ Southworth, had tutored the principal evidence, Grace Sowerbuts, a girl of the age of fourteen, but who had not the same instinctive genius for perjury as Jennet Device, to accuse the three persons above mentioned of having bewitched her; "so that," as the indictment runs, "by means thereof her body wasted and consumed." "The chief object," says Sir Walter Scott, "in this imposture, was doubtless the advantage and promotion of the Catholic cause, as the patient would have been in due time exorcised and the fiend dispossessed, by the same priest who had taught her to counterfeit the fits. Revenge against the women, who had become proselytes to the Church of England, was probably an additional motive." But the imposture broke down, from the inability of the principal witness to support the scheme of deception. Unsuccessful, however, as it proved, the time was well chosen, the groundwork excellently laid, the evidence industriously got up, and it must ever deserve a prominent place in the history--a history, how delightful when it shall be written in the spirit of philosophy and with due application of research--of human fraud and imposture. We can only speculate, of course, on such an occasion, but perhaps no trial is recorded as having taken place, with the results of which every body, the parties convicted only excepted, was, in all probability, better pleased or satisfied, than at this witch trial at Lancaster in 1612. The mob would be delighted with a pageant, always acceptable, in the execution of ten witches; and still more, that one of them was of a rank superior to their own;--the judge had no doubt, in his opinion, avoided each horn of the dilemma--the abomination mentioned in Scripture--punishing the innocent or letting the guilty go free--by tracking guilt with well breathed sagacity, and unravelling imposture with unerring skill;--a Jesuit had been unkennelled, a spectacle as gratifying to a serious Protestant in those days, as running down a fox to a thorough sportsman;--a plot had been discovered which might have made Lancaster Castle "to topple on its warders" and "slope its head to its foundations," and Master Cowell, who had held so many inquests, to vanish without leaving anything in his own person whereon an inquest could be holden;--a pestilent nest of incorrigible witches had been dug out and rooted up, and Pendle Hill placed under sanatory regulations;--and last, and not least, as affording matter of pride and exultation to every loyal subject, a commentary had at last been collected for two texts, which had long called for some such support without finding it, King James's _Demonology_, and his statute against witchcraft. When the _Discoverie_ of Master Potts, with its rich treasury of illustrative