Then there was another class of book; that which dealt in demonology and witchcraft, exemplified by a famous work called _Satan's Invisible World Discovered_. Writers of these things may or may not have believed in witches and fairies (which they classed together); but in any event they believed them to be wicked, the abomination of uncleanness. That made them false witnesses. My judgment revolted against such ridiculous assumptions. Here was a case, you see, where writers treated their subject too seriously, having the pulpit-cushion ever below their hand, and the fear of the Ordinary before their eyes.[3] Grimm and his friends, on the other hand, took it too lightly, seeing in it matter for a treatise on language. I got no good out of either school, and as time goes on I don't see a prospect of any adequate handling of the theme. I should like to think that I myself was to be the man to expound the fairy-kind candidly and methodically--candidly, that is, without going to literature for my data, and with the notion definitely out of mind that the fairy God-mother ever existed. But I shall never be that man, for though I am candid to the point of weakness, I am not to flatter myself that I have method. But to whomsoever he may be that undertakes the subject I can promise that the documents await their historian, and I will furnish him with a title which will indicate at a glance both the spirit of his attack and the nature of his treatise. [Footnote 3: The Reverend Robert Kirk, author of the _Secret Commonwealth_, was a clergyman and a believer in the beings of whom his book professed to treat. He found them a place in his Pantheon; but he knew very little about them. I shall have to speak of him again I expect. He is himself an object-lesson, though his teachings are naught.]