CHAPTER I.


DEMONOLOGY--THE DEVIL, A MOST UNACCOUNTABLE PERSONAGE--WHO IS HE?--HIS
PREDILECTION FOR OLD WOMEN--TRADITIONS CONCERNING EVIL SPIRITS, &C.

Children and old women have been accustomed to hear so many frightful
things of the cloven-footed potentate, and have formed such diabolical
ideas of his satanic majesty, exhibiting him in so many horrible and
monstrous shapes, that really it were enough to frighten Beelzebub
himself, were he by any accident to meet his prototype in the dark,
dressed up in the several figures in which imagination has embodied him.
And as regards men themselves, it might be presumed that the devil could
not by any means terrify them half so much, were they actually to meet
and converse with him face to face: so true it is that his satanic
majesty is not near so black as he is painted.

However useful the undertaking might prove, to give a true history of
this "tyrant of the air," this "God of the world," this "terror and
overseer of mankind," it is not our intention to become the devil's
biographer, notwithstanding the facility with which the materials might
be collected. Of the devil's origin, and the first rise of his family,
we have sufficient authority on record; and, as regards his dealings, he
has certainly always acted in the dark; though many of his doings both
moral, political, ecclesiastical, and empirical, have left such strong
impressions behind them, as to mark their importance in some
transactions, even at the present period of the christian world. These
discussions, however, we shall leave in the hands of their respective