Walter Scott
Demonology and Witchcraft
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Table of contents
INTRODUCTION.
LETTER I.
LETTER II.
LETTER III.
LETTER IV.
LETTER V.
LETTER VI.
LETTER VII.
LETTER VIII.
LETTER IX.
LETTER X.
INTRODUCTION.
Sir
Walter Scott's "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" were
his contribution to a series of books, published by John Murray,
which appeared between the years 1829 and 1847, and formed a
collection of eighty volumes known as "Murray's Family Library."
The series was planned to secure a wide diffusion of good literature
in cheap five-shilling volumes, and Scott's "Letters,"
written and published in 1830, formed one of the earlier books in the
collection.The
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in the
autumn of 1826, and Charles Knight, who had then conceived a plan of
a National Library, was entrusted, in July, 1827, with the
superintendence of its publications. Its first treatises appeared in
sixpenny numbers, once a fortnight. Its "British Almanac"
and "Companion to the Almanac" first appeared at the
beginning of 1829. Charles Knight started also in that year his own
"Library of Entertaining Knowledge." John Murray's "Family
Library" was then begun, and in the spring of 1832—the year of
the Reform Bill—the advance of civilization by the diffusion of
good literature, through cheap journals as well as cheap books, was
sought by the establishment of "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal"
in the North, and in London of "The Penny Magazine."In
the autumn of that year, 1832, on the 21st of September, Sir Walter
Scott died. The first warning of death had come to him in February,
1830, with a stroke of apoplexy. He had been visited by an old friend
who brought him memoirs of her father, which he had promised to
revise for the press. He seemed for half an hour to be bending over
the papers at his desk, and reading them; then he rose, staggered
into the drawing-room, and fell, remaining speechless until he had
been bled. Dieted for weeks on pulse and water, he so far recovered
that to friends outside his family but little change in him was
visible. In that condition, in the month after his seizure, he was
writing these Letters, and also a fourth series of the "Tales of
a Grandfather." The slight softening of the brain found after
death had then begun. But the old delight in anecdote and skill in
story-telling that, at the beginning of his career, had caused a
critic of his "Border Minstrelsy" to say that it contained
the germs of a hundred romances, yet survived. It gave to Scott's
"Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" what is for us now a
pathetic charm. Here and there some slight confusion of thought or
style represents the flickering of a light that flashes yet with its
old brilliancy. There is not yet the manifest suggestion of the loss
of power that we find presently afterwards in "Count Robert of
Paris" and "Castle Dangerous," published in 1831 as
the Fourth Series of "Tales of My Landlord," with which he
closed his life's work at the age of sixty.Milton
has said that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well
in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem. Scott's life was
a true poem, of which the music entered into all he wrote. If in his
earlier days the consciousness of an unlimited productive power
tempted him to make haste to be rich, that he might work out, as
founder of a family, an ideal of life touched by his own genius of
romance, there was not in his desire for gain one touch of sordid
greed, and his ideal of life only brought him closer home to all its
duties. Sir Walter Scott's good sense, as Lord Cockburn said, was a
more wonderful gift than his genius. When the mistake of a trade
connection with James Ballantyne brought ruin to him in 1826, he
repudiated bankruptcy, took on himself the burden of a debt of
£130,000, and sacrificed his life to the successful endeavour to pay
off all. What was left unpaid at his death was cleared afterwards by
the success of his annotated edition of his novels. No tale of
physical strife in the battlefield could be as heroic as the story of
the close of Scott's life, with five years of a death-struggle
against adversity, animated by the truest sense of honour. When the
ruin was impending he wrote in his diary, "If things go badly in
London, the magic wand of the Unknown will be shivered in his grasp.
The feast of fancy will be over with the feeling of independence. He
shall no longer have the delight of waking in the morning with bright
ideas in his mind, hasten to commit them to paper, and count them
monthly, as the means of planting such scaurs and purchasing such
wastes; replacing dreams of fiction by other prospective visions of
walks by'Fountain-heads,
and pathless groves; Places
which pale passion loves.'This
cannot be; but I may work substantial husbandry—i.e.
write history, and such concerns." It was under pressure of
calamity like this that Sir Walter Scott was compelled to make
himself known as the author of "Waverley." Closely upon
this followed the death of his wife, his thirty years' companion. "I
have been to her room," he wrote in May, 1826; "there was
no voice in it—no stirring; the pressure of the coffin was visible
on the bed, but it had been removed elsewhere; all was neat as she
loved it, but all was calm—calm as death. I remembered the last
sight of her: she raised herself in bed, and tried to turn her eyes
after me, and said with a sort of smile, 'You have all such
melancholy faces.' These were the last words I ever heard her utter,
and I hurried away, for she did not seem quite conscious of what she
said; when I returned, immediately departing, she was in a deep
sleep. It is deeper now. This was but seven days since. They are
arranging the chamber of death—that which was long the apartment of
connubial happiness, and of whose arrangement (better than in richer
houses) she was so proud. They are treading fast and thick. For weeks
you could have heard a footfall. Oh, my God!"A
few years yet of his own battle, while the shadows of night and death
were gathering about him, and they were re-united. In these "Letters
upon Demonology and Witchcraft," addressed to his son-in-law,
written under the first grasp of death, the old kindliness and good
sense, joined to the old charm in story-telling, stand firm yet
against every assault; and even in the decay that followed, when the
powers were broken of the mind that had breathed, and is still
breathing, its own health into the minds of tens of thousands of his
countrymen, nothing could break the fine spirit of love and honour
that was in him. When the end was very near, and the son-in-law to
whom these Letters were addressed found him one morning entirely
himself, though in the last extreme of feebleness: his eye was clear
and calm—every trace of the wild fire of delirium was extinguished:
"Lockhart," he said, "I may have but a minute to speak
to you. My dear, be a good man—be virtuous, be religious—be a
good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie
here."Another
volume of this Library may give occasion to recall Scott in the
noontide of his strength, companion of"The
blameless Muse who trains her sons For
hope and calm enjoyment."Here
we remember only how from among dark clouds the last light of his
genius shone on the path of those who were endeavouring to make the
daily bread of intellectual life—good books—common to all.
LETTER I.
Origin
of the general Opinions respecting Demonology among Mankind—The
Belief in the Immortality of the Soul is the main inducement to
credit its occasional re-appearance—The Philosophical Objections to
the Apparition of an Abstract Spirit little understood by the Vulgar
and Ignorant—The situations of excited Passion incident to
Humanity, which teach Men to wish or apprehend Supernatural
Apparitions—They are often presented by the Sleeping Sense—Story
of Somnambulism—The Influence of Credulity contagious, so that
Individuals will trust the Evidence of others in despite of their own
Senses—Examples from the "Historia Verdadera" of Bernal
Dias del Castillo, and from the Works of Patrick Walker—The
apparent Evidence of Intercourse with the Supernatural World is
sometimes owing to a depraved State of the bodily Organs—Difference
between this Disorder and Insanity, in which the Organs retain their
tone, though that of the Mind is lost—Rebellion of the Senses of a
Lunatic against the current of his Reveries—Narratives of a
contrary Nature, in which the Evidence of the Eyes overbore the
Conviction of the Understanding—Example of a London Man of
Pleasure—Of Nicolai, the German Bookseller and Philosopher—Of a
Patient of Dr. Gregory—Of an Eminent Scottish Lawyer, deceased—Of
this same fallacious Disorder are other instances, which have but
sudden and momentary endurance—Apparition of Maupertuis—Of a late
illustrious modern Poet—The Cases quoted chiefly relating to false
Impressions on the Visual Nerve, those upon the Ear next
considered—Delusions of the Touch chiefly experienced in
Sleep—Delusions of the Taste—And of the Smelling—Sum of the
Argument.You
have asked of me, my dear friend, that I should assist the "Family
Library" with the history of a dark chapter in human nature,
which the increasing civilization of all well-instructed countries
has now almost blotted out, though the subject attracted no ordinary
degree of consideration in the older times of their history.Among
much reading of my earlier days, it is no doubt true that I travelled
a good deal in the twilight regions of superstitious disquisitions.
Many hours have I lost—"I would their debt were less!"—in
examining old as well as more recent narratives of this character,
and even in looking into some of the criminal trials so frequent in
early days, upon a subject which our fathers considered as a matter
of the last importance. And, of late years, the very curious extracts
published by Mr. Pitcairn, from the Criminal Records of Scotland,
are, besides their historical value, of a nature so much calculated
to illustrate the credulity of our ancestors on such subjects, that,
by perusing them, I have been induced more recently to recall what I
had read and thought upon the subject at a former period.As,
however, my information is only miscellaneous, and I make no
pretensions, either to combat the systems of those by whom I am
anticipated in consideration of the subject, or to erect any new one
of my own, my purpose is, after a general account of Demonology and
Witchcraft, to confine myself to narratives of remarkable cases, and
to the observations which naturally and easily arise out of them;—in
the confidence that such a plan is, at the present time of day, more
likely to suit the pages of a popular miscellany, than an attempt to
reduce the contents of many hundred tomes, from the largest to the
smallest size, into an abridgement, which, however compressed, must
remain greatly too large for the reader's powers of patience.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!