216
HUDIBRAS.
[PART II.
Some only for not being drown'd,[1]145
And some for sitting above ground
Whole days and nights upon their breeches,[2]
And feeling pain, were hang'd for witches;
And some for putting knavish tricks
Upon green geese and turkey-chicks,150
Or pigs, that suddenly deceast,
Of griefs unnatural, as he guest;
Who after prov'd himself a witch,
And made a rod for his own breech.[3]
Did not the Devil appear to Martin 155
Luther in Germany for certain?[4]
And would have gull'd him with a trick,
But Mart. was too, too politic.
Did he not help the Dutch to purge,
At Antwerp, their cathedral church?[5]160
- ↑ See Part II. Canto I. line 503, note.
- ↑ One of the tests of a witch was to tie her le<rs across, and so to seat her on them that they were made to sustain the whole weight of her body, and rendered her incapable of motion. In this painful posture she would be kept during the whole of the trial, and sometimes 24 hours, without food, till she confessed.
- ↑ Dr Hutchinson, in his Historical Essay on Witchcraft, page 66, tells us, "that the country, tired of the cruelties committed by Hopkins, tried him by his own system. They tied his thumbs and toes, as he used to do others, and threw him into the water; when he swam like the rest."
- ↑ Luther, in his book de Missa privatâ, says he was persuaded to preach against the Mass by reasons suggested to him by the Devil, in a disputation. Melchior Adam says the Devil appeared to Luther in his own garden, in the shape of a black boar. And the Table Talk relates that when Luther was in his chamber, in the castle at Wartsburg, the Devil cracked some nuts which he had in a box upon the bed-post, tumbled empty barrels down-stairs, &c. There is still shown at this castle the mark on the wall, made by Luther's inkstand, which he hurled at the Devil's head, when he mocked the Reformer as he was busied on the translation of the Bible. But he generally rid himself of the tempter by jests, and sometimes rather unsavoury ones. See some anecdotes of Luther's belief in witchcraft in Luther's Table Talk by Hazlitt, p. 251, &c.
- ↑ In the beginning of the civil war in Flanders, the common people at Antwerp broke into the cathedral and destroyed the ornaments. Strada, in his book de Bello Belgieo, says, that "several devils were seen to assist them; without whose aid it would have been impossible, in so short a time, to have done so much mischief."
