Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus--His Sentiments on Witchcraft and Demonology--Baxter's 'Certainty of the World of Spirits,' &c.--Witch Trial at Bury St. Edmund's by Sir Matthew Hale, 1664--The Evidence adduced in Court--Two Witches hanged--Three hanged at Exeter in 1682--The last Witches judicially executed in England--Uniformity of the Evidence adduced at the Trials--Webster's Attack upon the Witch-Creed in 1677--Witch Trials in England at the end of the Seventeenth Century--French Parliaments vindicate the Diabolic Reality of the Crime--Witchcraft in Sweden. The bold licentiousness and ill-concealed scepticism of Charles II. and his Court, whose despotic prejudices, however, supported by the zeal of the Church, prosecuted dissenters from a form of religion which maintained 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong,' might be indifferent to the prejudice of witchcraft. But the princes and despots of former times have seldom been more careful of the lives than they have been of the liberties, of their subjects. The formal apology for the reality of that crime published by Charles II.'s chaplain-in-ordinary, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Glanvil, against the modern Sadducees (a very inconsiderable sect) who denied both ghosts and witches, their well-attested apparitions and acts, has been already noticed. His philosophic inquiry (so he terms it) into the nature and operations of witchcraft (_Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Sadduceeism Vanquished, or 'Considerations about Witchcraft'), was occasioned by a case that came under the author's personal observation--the 'knockings' of the demon of Tedworth in the house of a Mr. Mompesson. The Tedworth demon must have been of that sort of active spirits which has been so obliging of late in enlightening the spiritual _seances_ of our time.