This scepticism on our part, however, is of very modern date; for even in the early part of this century the belief was not quite eradicated in England, and we have only to step back a century more to find it acknowledged without shame by a civilized and highly enlightened people, and at a time, too, when the literary intellect of England shone as brightly as ever in her history; when the memory of Dryden was still fresh in the minds of many of his most cherished friends and admirers; when Pope had risen, and Addison was painting his genial portrait of Sir Roger de Coverly; when the bewitching "nightingale at Twickenham" poured forth his sweetest songs, and kind-hearted Steele and Swift, stern, incorrigible, and lonely, domineered over the proudest of English peers and statesmen. Nothing can ever be more touching than the sad record of those dark days when the fair Eleanor Cobham, the wife of a duke, and the aunt of a king of "Great Britain," did penance for her "witchcraft," and walked "hoodless save her 'kerchief" through all the crowded streets of London and Westminster, taunted and hooted at by a ragged crowd, to offer a "consecrated taper" at the high altar of St. Paul's, and thence to her cruel, life-long imprisonment at Kenilworth, while her wretched accomplice, Bolingbroke, expiated his crime on a gibbet at Tyburn. And there are those seemingly darker days when Archbishop Cranmer, a high-priest of the tender Jesus, directed his clergy at large to make "strict inquiry into all witchcraft and such like craft invented by the devil"; and when that very honorable personage, the Lord Chief Justice Coke, uttered these memorable words: "It would be a great defect in government if so great an abomination had passed with impunity." Then no one cast even the shadow of a doubt on the existence of witchcraft, or even questioned the extraordinary powers which were at the time imputed to a witch. And one becomes sensible of the dark superstitions that must have pervaded even the general atmosphere of the immortal poet Shakespeare, when he makes Ford lay his cudgel across the shoulders of Falstaff, supposing him to be the "wise woman of Brentford," and embodies the grander and more terrible idea of witchcraft as no man has ever done before or after him in the tragedy of "Macbeth."