her successor, the vain and weak-minded James— Pendle stands Round cop, surveying all the wild moor-lands, And Malkin’s Tower, a little cottage, where Report makes caitiff witches meet, to swear Their homage to the devil, and contrive The deaths of men and beasts. The genius of superstition that fills the mind with Shaping fantasies that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends, still lingers, and the voices of tradition may occasionally be heard in the embowered gloom of its solitary cloughs and dingles; but under the disenchanting influences of steam Pendle has lost much of that weird character of wonder and fear with which the shaping power of the imagination had enshrouded it, though it still retains much of its wild and uncultivated character, and there are spots that remain almost as savage and unfrequented, if not as much feared, as in the days of the “British Solomon,” when its secluded hollows and heathery wastes were commonly believed to be the scenes of midnight feasting and diabolical revelries, and everything and everybody were supposed to be under the evil influence of decrepit hags who had sworn to do the devil service, and were endowed by the Prince of Darkness with the power to work destruction on man and beast. Happily, in these days, a gentler species of witchcraft prevails. Though the spells of the Lancashire witches are as potent as ever, they are exercised without fear of judge or jury. Few escape the fascinations, and, it may be added, still fewer desire to do so. But Pendle has other associations than those with which the pedantic Master Potts and Harrison Ainsworth have made us familiar. It was upon its broad peak that George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, received his “first illumination.” There, as he tells us in his _Journal_, “the Lord let me see in what places He had a great people to be gathered together;” and then he adds, “As I went down I found a spring of water in the side of the hill, with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunken but little for several days before.” The spring is still there, and to this day is known in the neighbourhood as George Fox’s well. Wiswall, uprising in peaceful serenity upon the skirts of Pendle, calls to remembrance the conflict between monarchy and monasticism—the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” and the penalty that Paslew, the last abbot of Whalley, paid for his share in that uprising—the destruction of himself and the house over which he had so long presided, for it was upon a gallows erected in front of Wiswall Hall, the place of his birth, and in sight of the abbey, which had then passed into profane hands, that Paslew was ignominiously hanged. A flat gravestone, in the north aisle of Whalley Church, marks the last resting-place of the ill-fated ecclesiastic. A floriated cross and a chalice, the emblems of his office, are carved upon it, with the simple and touching inscription—