The trials of Bridget Bishop, Mary Easty, a sister of Rebecca Nurse, the Jacobs family, Martha Carrier and Philip and Mary English, Elizabeth How, Rev. George Burroughs, Sarah Wildes, Susanna Martin, John Williard, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeater, Margaret Scott, William Reed, Samuel Wardell and Mary Parker,[47] are all interesting and present the details of the most stirring tragedies the courts of justice in this country have ever enacted, but space in this chapter will not permit the detailed account of these various trials. From the earliest times, a great deal has been written upon the subject of witchcraft and sorcery, in the different languages of Europe. The delusion has furnished a theme for long and arduous treatises by scientist, divine and philosopher and the poet and novelist, has found it a fruitful source of inspiration for song and story. The works of Dr. Joseph Glanvil, chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles II., and R. Baxter, in his “Certainties of the Works of Spirits,” as vindications of the superstitions of witchcraft and sorcery, did much to spread the delusion, during the popularity of the superstition. Balthazar Bekker, a reformed Dutch clergyman, was the first to strike at the very foundation of the delusion, near the end of the seventeenth century; Hutchinson, in his historical essay on Witchcraft, in 1718, also took a skeptical view of the subject, and these men, with Weier and Reginald Scot, along with the sturdy advocates who defended the prisoners charged with witchcraft, and such judges as Lord Holt, in England, did much to discourage and overcome the belief in the fallacy. Burn’s lines to the “De’il” aptly express the popular notion of the time when the belief in spooks and evil spirits obtained: “Ae dreary, windy, winter night, The stars shot down wi’ sklentin light, Wi’ you, mysel, I got a fright Ayont the lough; Ye, like a rash-bush, stood in sight Wi’ waving sough. The cudgel in my nieve did shake, Each bristled hair stood like a stake, When wi’ an eldritch stour, ‘quaick, quaick’, Among the springs Away ye squatter’d, like a drake, On whistling wiggs.” The notion of the devil then was that he was a large, ill-shaped, hairy sprite, with long tail, horns, cloven feet and wings, as we so often see him pictured in the old representations. Before Milton’s time, he was believed to be a mere mischievous, ugly and petty spirit, who played fantastic tricks upon humanity, but Milton made of him the paragon of evil, not merely grotesque, but a fiend, whose power was all used for evil.[48]