Before burning the witch, it was, however, necessary to catch her. Here--and more particularly in England--private enterprise stepped in to supplement public effort. Witch-finding offered a respectable and lucrative career for anyone gifted with the requisite imagination, and provided a safe opening for those who had failed in other walks of life. Enterprise, imagination, the form of facile expression, the instinct of sensationalism, and so forth--were all necessary for the finished witch-finder, it is true. The names of many have come down to us, but none more fully earned the prophetic title of the Napoleon of witch-finding than Matthew Hopkins, who alone gained, by his eminent services to the public, a "handle to his name"--that of "Witch-Finder General." Hopkins, who flourished in the mid-seventeenth century, gauged the public taste in witch-sensation to a nicety--and elevated his trade to an exact science. Yet curiously enough, he only entered it by accident, owing to an epidemic of witchcraft in his native town of Manningtree. His public spirit leading him to take a prominent part in the discovery and punishment of the culprits, it became plainly evident in which direction his talents could be best employed, and what had been a hobby became his life-work. His position having been legalised, he adopted the manner of a judge, taking regular circuits through the four counties which he more particularly took under his protection, or giving his services to any towns applying for them at the extremely modest charge of twenty shillings and expenses. More than a hundred witches were brought to punishment by his painstaking exertions, though perhaps his greatest triumph was achieved in the case of the Reverend Mr. Lewis, the "reading" parson of Framlingham. Mr. Lewis was a churchman, and as such regarded as a malignant by the Puritan Government, and, needless to say, by Mr. Hopkins, himself a Puritan of the most orthodox type. Mr. Lewis, being eighty-five years of age, was tortured after Mr. Hopkins' recipe, and was so brought to confess that he had made a compact with Satan, that he kept two imps, and that he had sunk several ships by his magic arts. He was duly hanged, though it is satisfactory to know that at his death he withdrew the confession his human weakness had extorted from him and died with a dignity becoming his age and cloth.