unseen powers as Good Folk; the other is a bird of night, whose shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair: it sucks with the vampire, gorges with the ghoul, is choked by the night into the present World, is treated in a Manner different to the prevailing Opinions of Mankind. And an Attempt is made from Rational Principles to account for the Species of such supernatural Appearances, when they may be suppos'd consistent with the Divine Appointment in the Government of the World. With the sentiments of Monsieur Le Clerc, Mr. Locke, Mr. Addison, and Others on this important Subject. In which some humorous and diverting instances are remark'd, in order to divert that Gloom of Melancholy that naturally arises in the Human Mind, from reading or meditating on such Subjects. Illustrated with suitable Cuts. London: Printed in the year M,DCC, LII. [Mainly from De Foe's History of Apparitions.] Satan's Invisible World discovered; or, a choice Collection of modern Relations; Proving evidently, against the Atheists of this present Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Apparitions, from authentic Records, Attestations of Witnesses, and undoubted Verity. To which is added that marvellous History of Major Weir and his Sister, the Witches of Bargarran, Pittenweem, and Calder, etc. By George Sinclair, late Professor of Philosophy in Glasgow. -No man should be vain that he can injure the merit of a Book; for the meanest rogue may burn a City, or kill a Hero; whereas he could never build the one, or equal the other. Sir George M'Kenzie. -Edinburgh: Sold by P. Anderson, Parliament-Square. M. DCC. LXXX. La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen Age, ou Étude sur les superstitions païennes qui se sont perpétuées jusqu'à nos jours. Par L. F. Alfred Maury. Troisième Edition revue et corrigée. Paris: Didier. 1864. hag, pines away under the witch's charm, and commits uncleanness with the embodied Principle of Evil, giving up the fair realm of innocent belief to a murky throng from the slums and stews of the debauched brain. Both have vanished from among educated men, and such superstition as comes to the surface nowadays is the harmless Jacobitism of sentiment, pleasing itself with a fiction all the more because there is no exacting reality behind it to impose a duty or demand a sacrifice. And as Jacobitism survived the Stuarts, so this has outlived the dynasty to which it professes an after-dinner allegiance. It nails a horseshoe over the door, but keeps a rattle by its bedside to summon a more substantial watchman; it hangs a crape on the beehives to get a taste of ideal sweetness, but obeys the teaching of the latest bee-book for material and marketable honey. This is the æsthetic variety of the malady, or rather, perhaps, it is only the old complaint robbed of all its pain, and lapped in waking dreams by the narcotism of an age of science. To the world at large it is not undelightful to see the poetical instincts of friends and neighbors finding some other vent than that of verse. But there has been a superstition of very different fibre, of more intense and practical validity, the deformed child of faith, peopling the midnight of the mind with fearful shapes and phrenetic suggestions, |