in boyhood. Were there not on judicial record attestation and evidence,
solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous to those now exercised by
Margrave,--of sorcerers instigating to sin through influences ascribed to
Demons; making their apparitions glide through guarded walls, their voices
heard from afar in the solitude of dungeons or monastic cells; subjugating
victims to their will, by means which no vigilance could have detected, if
the victims themselves had not confessed the witchcraft that had ensnared,
courting a sure and infamous death in that confession, preferring such
death to a life so haunted? Were stories so gravely set forth in the pomp
of judicial evidence, and in the history of times comparatively recent,
indeed to be massed, pell-mell together, as a moles indigesta of senseless
superstition,--all the witnesses to be deemed liars; all the victims and
tools of the sorcerers, lunatics; all the examiners or judges, with their
solemn gradations--lay and clerical--from Commissions of Inquiry to Courts
of Appeal,--to be despised for credulity, loathed for cruelty; or, amidst
records so numerous, so imposingly attested, were there the fragments of a
terrible truth? And had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we now
deem so savage, by which the world was rid of scourges more awful and more
potent than the felon with his candid dagger? Fell instigators of the
evil in men's secret hearts, shaping into action the vague, half-formed
desire, and guiding with agencies impalpable, unseen, their spell-bound
instruments of calamity and death.

Such were the gloomy questions that I--by repute, the sternest advocate of
common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher into
flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes of all
that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I, self-boasting
physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist--revolved, not amidst gloomy
pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow through laughing
meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of the golden