written in the black-letter folios of the Magi, seldom to be conned seriously in this matter-of-fact age? It may now be thought very undignified in Satan to condescend to such hocus-pocus whimsies as the evil eye, magic circles, tipping tables, cabalistic words, changing a truss of hay into a horse, producing the phantom of a deer-hunt in a banqueting hall, saying the Lord's Prayer backward, and the like. That credulous age has gone by, and we, vaunting our science, sneer at it; yes, we, in this age of table-tapping spiritualism! Our learned judges who ridicule Lord Hale for his faith in witchcraft; our savans who smile at the idea of the protective horseshoe, who can not see the peculiar virtue in hanging a witch with a green withe, instead of a rope, swallow whole tomes of gibberish revelations from silly and lieing spirits, rapping out their ridiculous fanfaronade on varnished mahogany! There was something horribly definite in the shapes which peopled the medieval imagination. After beating around literature for dim intimations of spiritual devils, it is refreshing to come upon the devil in fact and in form. Those two great eyes stare at you; the flame which breathes from mouth and nostril glares upon you. There is the snaky hair and hardened horn, the dim hide and shaggy back, the divided hoof and double vibrating tongue, the brimstone smell and candles burning blue, as they wink and flicker. The air grows hot, the heart beats as it burns, and the hair of the flesh stands up, while in icy rills sensation chills to the bone! Oh! there was in this a sturdy belief, unruffled by science, quite ravishing to transcendental souls. There was then a happy propensity, especially among the ignorant, to resolve every thing strange and wonderful into devilism. A solution so convenient will commend itself to our rapping circles, as well for its simplicity as for its agreement with the maxim, that where the marvel is unaccountable, the devil is in it. Beside, if not true, it is as good a solution as any yet submitted. This is the way the ignorant people of the fifteenth century resolved all the wonders of magic and the results of alchemy. The wooden pigeon of Architus, the brazen serpent of Bœtius, which hissed, the golden birds of Leo, which sung, and the brazen head of Friar Bacon, which spoke, were evidences of Satanic connection. The scholars and chemists of that time did not feel indignant, either, at the alliance;
