whether he doth acquit himself as a gentleman (which I hear he is) in
it, I shall leave to others to judge." This is surely the first time
that a belief in witchcraft was ever made a test of gentlemanly
propriety.

Two years before the trial, which is the subject of the following
republication, took place, the hamlet of Thornton, in the parish of
Coxwold, in the adjoining county of York, gave birth to one who was
destined so utterly to demolish the unstable and already shaken and
tottering structure which Bodin, Delrio, and their followers had set
up, as not to leave one stone of that unhallowed edifice remaining
upon another. Of the various course of life of John Webster, the
author of "The Displaying of supposed Witchcraft," his travels,
troubles, and persecutions; of the experience he had had in restless
youth and in unsettled manhood of religion under various forms,
amongst religionists of almost every denomination; and of those
profound and wide-ranging researches in every art and science in which
his vigorous intellect delighted, and by which it was in declining age
enlightened, sobered and composed; it is much to be regretted that we
have not his own narrative, written in the calm evening of his days,
when he walked the slopes of Pendle, from where,

"Through shadow dimly seen
Rose Clid'row's castle grey;"[23]

when, to use his own expressions, he lived a "solitary and sedentary
life, _mihi et musis_, having more converse with the dead than the
living, that is, more with books than with men." The facts for his
biography are scanty and meagre, and are rather collected by inference
from his works, than from any other source. He was born at Thornton on