In addition to these we have, on the authority of grave philosophers, legions of household devils, from such as “commonly work by blazing stars,” fire-drakes, or _ignes fatui_, to those who “counterfeit suns and moons, and oftentimes sit on ship masts.” Their common place of rendezvous, when unemployed, is Mount Hecla. Cardon, with an enviable gravity, declares that “his father had an aerial devil bound to him for twenty and eight years.” Paracelsus relates many stories, all authenticated, of she-devils, “that have lived and been married to mortal men, and so continued for certain years with them, and after for some dislike have forsaken them.” Olaus Magnus—a most delightful liar—has a narrative of “one Hotheius, a king of Sweden, that, having lost his company as he was hunting one day, met with these water-nymphs and fairies, and was feasted by them”; and Hector Boethius of “Macbeth and Banquo, two Scottish lords, that, as they were wandering in the woods, had their fortune told them by three strange women!” For the “good people,” the wood-nymphs, foliots, fairies, they are, on the best authority, to be seen in many places in Germany, “where they do usually walk in little coats some two feet long.” Subterranean devils are divided by Olaus Magnus into six companies; they commonly haunt mines, “and the metal-men in many places account it good luck, a sign of treasure and rich ore, when they see them.” Georgius Agricola (_de subterraneis animantibus_) reckons two more kinds, “that are clothed after the manner of metal-men, and will do their work.” Their office, according to the shrewd guess of certain philosophers, “is to keep treasure in the earth that it be not all at once revealed.” On the 20th of June 1484, it is upon record that the devil appeared “at Hamond, in Saxony,” in the likeness of a field-piper, and carried away a hundred and thirty children “that were never after seen!” I might fill folios with the pranks and malicious mummeries of the evil spirit, all, too, duly attested by the most respectable witnesses, but shall at once leave the demons of the philosophers for the spirits of the playmongers, the devils of the world for the devils of the stage. Why is it that, nine times out of ten, your stage devil is a droll rather than a terrible creature? I suspect this arises from the bravado of innate wickedness. We endeavour to shirk all thoughts, all recollections of his horrible attributes, by endowing him with grotesque propensities. We strive to laugh ourselves out of our fears: we make a mountebank of what is in truth our terror, and resolutely strive to grin away our apprehensions. Surely some feeling of this kind must be at the bottom of all our ten thousand jokes at the devil’s expense—of the glee and enjoyment with which the devil is received at the theatre; where, until the appearance of Mr Wieland, he had been but a commonplace absurdity, a dull repetition of a most dull joke.