It is hard to make old and feeble women, who generally are the
depositaries of these national treasures, believe that the inquirer
can have any real interest in the matter. They fear that the question
is only put to turn them into ridicule; for the popular mind is a
sensitive plant; it becomes coy, and closes its leaves at the first
rude touch; and when once shut, it is hard to make these aged lips
reveal the secrets of the memory. There they remain, however, forming
part of an under-current of tradition, of which the educated classes,
through whose minds flows the bright upper-current of faith, are apt
to forget the very existence. Things out of sight, and therefore out
of mind. Now and then a wave of chance tosses them to the surface
from those hidden depths, and all Her Majesty's inspectors of schools
are shocked at the wild shapes which still haunt the minds of the
great mass of the community. It cannot be said that the English are
not a superstitious people. Here we have gone on for more than a
hundred years proclaiming our opinion that the belief in witches, and
wizards, and ghosts, and fetches, was extinct throughout the land.
Ministers of all denominations have preached them down, and
philosophers convinced all the world of the absurdity of such vain
superstitions; and yet it has been reserved for another learned
profession, the Law, to produce in one trial at the Staffordshire
assizes, a year or two ago, such a host of witnesses, who firmly
believed in witchcraft, and swore to their belief in spectre dogs and
wizards, as to show that, in the Midland counties at least, such
traditions are anything but extinct. If so much of the bad has been
spared by steam, by natural philosophy, and by the Church, let us
hope that some of the good may still linger along with it, and that
an English Grimm may yet arise who may carry out what Mr. Chambers
has so well begun in Scotland, and discover in the mouth of an Anglo-
Saxon Gammer Grethel, some, at least, of those popular tales which