The grand postulate of direct diabolical agency being once assumed and quietly conceded on all hands, any absurdity whatever was easily engrafted on it. Satan being thus brought home, as it were, to men's business and bosoms, every one speculated on his habits and demeanour according to his own light; and soon the insane fancies of minds crazed by nature, disease, or misfortunes, echoed and repeated from all sides, gathered themselves into a code or system of faith, which, being instilled into the mind with the earliest rudiments of instruction, fettered even the strongest intellects with its baleful influence. The mighty minds of Luther, of Calvin, and of Knox, so quick in detecting error, so undaunted and merciless in exposing it, yielded tamely to its thrall; the upright and able Sir Matthew Hale passed sentence of death, in 1664, on two poor women accused of witchcraft, and Sir Thomas Browne, the historian of "Vulgar Errors," who was examined as a witness on the trial, gave it as his opinion that the fits under which the patients had laboured, though natural in themselves, were "heightened by the Devil co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villanies!" and apparently on this evidence chiefly did the conviction proceed. Neither, in fact, were the incongruities and inconsistencies of the witch-creed of the time so calculated, as they might at first sight appear, to awaken men's minds to the radical insanity of the belief. The dash of the ludicrous, which mingles itself with almost all the exploits of Satan and his satellites, grew, naturally enough, out of the monkish conception of Satan, and might be supposed not inconsistent with the character of a set of beings whose proceedings of course could not be expected to resemble those either of men or angels. The monkish Satan has no dignity about him: in soul and body he is low and deformed. "Gli occhi ha vermigli, e la barba unta ed atra, E 'l ventre largo, ed unghiate le mani, Graffia gli spirti, gli scuoja, ed isquatra[12]."