Sorcery and witchcraft (to which, notwithstanding its title, Mr. Wright's book chiefly relates) was a more vulgar pursuit, and is a more difficult matter to determine. The true magician was a master over both the seen and the unseen world. His art could _compel_ spirits or demons to obey him, however much against their will. It seems a question whether a spell of sufficient potency could not control Satan himself. The witch or wizard was a vulgar being, a mere slave of the Evil One, with no original power, very limited in derived power, and, it would appear, with no means of acting directly except upon the elements. The facts relating to witchcraft, being often matter of legal record, are more numerous and more correctly narrated than those relating to magic. The difficulty of fixing the exact boundary between truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, in the case of witchcraft, is not so easily settled as the sciolist in liberal philosophy imagines. Of course we all know that men and women could not travel through the air on broomsticks, or cause storms, or afflict cattle. Their innocence of the intention is not always so certain: their power over a nervous or weakly person, especially in bad health, might really, through the influence of imagination, produce the death threatened, and the miserable patient might pine away as his real or supposed waxen image slowly melted before the fire. At a time when the belief in witchcraft was entertained by society in general, as well as by the majority of educated men, it is not likely that the persons who were generally accused of it were skeptical on the subject. Their innocence would lie, not in their disbelief of its power, but in their rejection of the practice. That an accusation of witchcraft was sometimes made from political, religious, or personal motives, is true; and numbers of innocent victims were sacrificed in times of public mania on the subject. The question is, whether many did not attempt unlawful arts in full belief of their efficacy; and whether some, a compound of the self-dupe and the impostor, did not make use of their reputed power to indulge in the grossest license and to perpetrate abominable crimes.