While their hands were still red and poluted with the innocent blood of this poor defenceless woman, our magistrates went about establishing a Library in the town, which seems indeed to have been very much wanted among them: and we have already given them credit for that undertaking. But its inconsistency with the other part of their conduct is so manifest and glaring (especially if we join with it their laudable _feast of reconciliation_,) that one is apt to wonder that they should be capable of acting such different parts, or of being the performers of actions so totally dissimilar and heterogeneous. It must however be owned that the inconsistencies of the human character are sometimes very strange, unaccountable, and surprising. After the last mentioned affair we hear no more of these horrid doings at Lynn till 1645, when _Dorothy Lee_, and _Grace Wright_, as Mackerel informs us, were _hanged_ here for witchcraft. But we suspect that this is misdated, and that this bloody scene did not take place till the following year, (1646) as it appears, from the Town Records, that on the 11th. of May, that year, it was “ordered that alderman Thomas Rivett be requested to send for Mr. _Hopkins_, the Witch-discoverer, to come to Lynn, and his charges and recompense to be borne by the town.” We may presume that he did not hesitate to come, and that it was in consequence of his coming the prosecution and execution of those poor unhappy creatures took place. It must have been a sad time when such arch-villains as this Hopkins were caressed by the magistrates, and employed to assist them in the administration of justice!—Of him we shall hereafter give some further account. Those two women were probably the last that were put to death here for witchcraft: but great numbers suffered afterwards for the same imaginary crime in other parts of the kingdom, to the great disgrace of both the makers and the administrators of our laws. Even till within these sixty or seventy years, if we are not mistaken, there have been instances among us of poor defenceless beings doomed to capital punishment for the same pretended offence: and though our legislators and rulers seem no longer to have any faith in the existence of witches, yet the common people in many places are as much in that belief as ever, and would be very glad, no doubt, to have the old sanguinary laws still put in execution. A melancholy instance of the present existence of such a superstitious belief among our country people occurred but about two years ago at Great Paxton in Huntingdonshire, of which we shall, perhaps, in another place take some further notice. SECTION II. _Brief account of some of the principal_ witch-finders, _or_ witch discoverers, _as they were sometimes called_, _those pests of society_, _who were a disgrace to the country and to the age in which they lived_.