of skill and pride, to shuffle feet and brandish knees thus, and to trip like a doe, and skip like a squirrel? And wherein differs thy leapings from the hoppings of a frog, or bounces of a goat, or friskings of a dog, or gesticulations of a monkey? And cannot a palsy shake such a loose leg as that? Dost thou not twirl like a calf that has the turn, and twitch up thy houghs just like a spring-hault [? spring-galled] tit?" In some of his last fits he announced that he must be either killed or cured before the 25th March. This, says the deposition of his father and mother, and two of his sisters, proved true; for on the 24th of that month he had his last fit, the devil being no longer able to withstand the means used with so much vigour and perseverance to expel him; one of the most effectual of which was a medicine, prescribed, in the way of his profession, by Dr. Chew, a medical practitioner in the neighbourhood. Mr. Zachary Taylor asserts that the preachers, disappointed and mortified at their ill success in Dugdale's case, gave it out that some of his connexions were witches, and in contract with the devil, and that, they supposed, was the cause why they had not been able to relieve him. Under this impression they procured some of the family to be searched, that they might see if they had not teats, or the devil's mark; and they tried them by the test of saying the Lord's Prayer. Some remains of the evil spirit, however, seem still to have possessed Richard; for, though after this he had no fits, yet once, when he had got too much drink, he was after another manner than drunken persons usually are. In confirmation of which feats, not only the eight ministers, but twenty respectable inhabitants, affixed their attestations to a document prepared for the purpose; and three of the magistrates of the district--Hugh, Lord Willoughby [of Parham], Ralph Egerton, Esq., and Thos. Braddyll, Esq.--received depositions from the attesting parties. This monstrous mass of absurdity, superstition, and fraud--for it was beyond doubt a compound of them all--was exposed with success by the Rev. Zachary Taylor, the Bishop of Chester's curate at Wigan, one of the King's preachers in Lancashire; but the reverend divine mixed with his censures too much party asperity, insisting that the whole was an artifice of the Nonconformist ministers, in imitation of the pretended miracles of the Roman Catholic priests, and likening it to the fictions of John Darrell, B.A., which had been practised a century before upon the family of Mr. Starkie, in the same county. Of the resemblance in many of its parts there can be no doubt; but the names of the venerable Oliver Heywood and Thomas Jolly form a sufficient guarantee against imposition on their part; and the probability is that the ministers were the dupes of a popular superstition in the hands of a dissolute and artful family.[72] FOOTNOTES: [62] See _Transactions of Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire_.