hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful
beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead
man's skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. The
Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the
invisible world. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, round whose name are
clustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between man
and the devil, the apparitions and witches in _Macbeth_, the dead
hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmaker
and the passing-bell in Webster's sombre tragedy, _The Duchess of
Malfi_, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror.
As a foil to his _Masque of Queens_ (1609) Ben Jonson introduced
twelve loathly witches with Até as their leader, and embellished
his description of their profane rites, with details culled from
James I.'s treatise on Demonology and from learned ancient
authorities.

In _The Pilgrim's Progress_, Despair, who "had as many lives as a
cat," his wife Diffidence at Doubting Castle, and Maul and
Slaygood are the ogres of popular story, whose acquaintance
Bunyan had made in chapbooks during his ungodly youth.
Hobgoblins, devils and fiends, "sturdy rogues" like the three
brothers Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, who set upon Littlefaith
in Dead Man's Lane, lend the excitement of terror to Christian's
journey to the Celestial City. The widespread belief in witches
and spirits to which Browne and Burton and many others bear
witness in the seventeenth century, lived on in the eighteenth
century, although the attitude of the "polite" in the age of
reason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A scene in one of
the _Spectator_ essays illustrates pleasantly the state of
popular opinion. Addison, lodging with a good-natured widow in