Similar trials have nevertheless continued to be held in various parts of Europe during the whole of the last century, and many innocent lives have been forfeited to this apparently ineradicable belief in witchcraft. Even after torture was abandoned in compliance with the wiser views of our age, long imprisonment with its attending sufferings and great anxiety as to the issue, proved fully sufficient to extort voluntary confessions, which were, of course, of no value in themselves, but served the purpose of keeping alive the popular superstition. In 1728 a specially fearful trial of this kind took place in Hungary, during which nearly all the disgraceful scenes of mediæval barbarity were reënacted, and which ended in a number of cruel executions. The last witches' trial in Germany took place in 1749, when the mother-superior of a convent near Würzburg, in Bavaria, known as Emma Renata, was condemned to be burnt, but by the leniency of the authorities, was allowed to die by decapitation. Switzerland was the scene of the last of these trials ever held, for with this act of justice, as it was called by the good people of Glarus, the persecution ended. Even in England, however, the feeling itself seems to have lingered long after actual trials had ceased. Thus it is well known that the terrible trial of witches held at Marlboro, under Queen Elizabeth, led to the establishment of a so-called witches' sermon to be delivered annually at Huntingdon, and this custom was faithfully observed down to the latter part of the eighteenth century. Nearly about the same time--in 1743--an earnest effort was made in Scotland to kindle once more the fire of fierce persecution. In the month of February of that year, the Associate Presbytery, in a public document addressed to the Presbytery of the Seceded Churches, required for certain purposes a solemn acknowledgment of former sins, and a vow to renounce them forever. Among these sins that austere body enumerated the "_abolition_ of the death penalty for witchcraft," since the latter was forbidden in Holy Writ, and the leniency which had taken the place of the former severity in punishing this crime, had given an opening to Satan to tempt and actually to seduce others by means of the same old accursed and dangerous snares.--(_Edinb. Rev._, Jan. 1847.) II. BLACK AND WHITE MAGIC. "Peace!--the charm's wound up." --MACBETH.