basest of malefactors. Their imaginary crimes created a thirst for their blood; and people of all stations, from the highest to the lowest, attended their trials at Lancaster with an intensity of interest that such mischievous persons, now divested of their sting, naturally excited. It has been said that witchcraft and kingcraft in England came in and went out with the Stuarts. This is not true. The doctrine of necromancy was in universal belief in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and there was not perhaps a man in Lancashire who doubted its existence. The belief in witchcraft and in demoniacal possession was confined to no particular sect or persuasion; the Roman Catholics, the members of the Church of England, the Presbyterians, Independents, and even the Methodists (though a sect of more recent standing) have all fallen into this delusion; and yet each denomination has upbraided the other with gross superstition, and not unfrequently with wilful fraud. It is due, however, to the ministers of the Established Church to say that they were among the first of our public writers to denounce the belief in witchcraft with all its attendant mischiefs; and the names of Dr. Harsnett, afterwards Archbishop of York, of Dr. John Webster (who detected Robinson, the Lancashire witch-hunter), of Zach. Taylor, one of the king's preachers for Lancashire, and of Dr. Hutchinson, the chaplain in ordinary to George I., are all entitled to the public gratitude for their efforts to explode these pernicious superstitions. For upwards of a century the sanguinary and superstitious laws of James I. disgraced the English statute-book; but in the ninth year of George II. (1735) a law was enacted repealing the statute of James I., and prohibiting any prosecution, suit, or proceeding against any person for witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration. In this way the doctrine of witchcraft, with all its attendant errors, was finally exploded, except among the most ignorant of the vulgar.[128] A HOUSEHOLD BEWITCHED. (From the _Late Lancashire Witches_, a comedy, by Thomas Heywood.)