WITCHCRAFT AND SUPERSTITION.

535

human mind had not been worn away. Society had not smoothed the stone from the brook. Men preserved, untamed by conventional usages, many of the irregularities, much of the force and wildness of their natural tempers. The phases of jealousy, personal enmity, love, or malice were more strongly marked. They did what was right in their own eyes. There were no social barriers to curb infectious hate, or check the strong hand. "Human statutes had not purged the general weal." Assassinations and murder were encouraged by sanctuary. In the very heart of the City there lived a lawless host, the cankers of peace, the lees of bloody wars, swashbucklers and bravos, roysterers, beggars, and broken soldiers, soldiers of fortune, feudal retainers, dangerous to the peace of the Commonwealth. The evils of the plague, pestilence, and famine, battle, and murder, and sudden death, had then real significance. But facts were heightened and made more dreadful by ignorance. Every sudden death was said to be by poison. Every wasting away, by witchcraft. Jewel, one of the great lights of the Church, and the learned author of the 'Apology,' in a sermon delivered before the Queen urges publicly, "These eyes have seen most evident and manifest marks of their [the sorcerers'] wickedness. Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto the death; their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is stemmed, their senses are bereft."

Thus Hatton, Raleigh, Burleigh, Leicester, Robert Cecil were all in turn charged with poisoning their enemies. The fear of Italian craft was popular. The crimes of the Borgias fructified by the heat of imagination in the general ignorance. Men read little, compared less,

536

GHOSTLY HORRORS.

but believed all. Superstition and fear conspired to prevent anatomical investigation. Vesalius' great book, De corporis humani fabrica," had been published. But ignorance of the language in which it was written had prevented the circulation of its knowledge in England. Thus about all men's lives hung a mysterious fatality—a superstition begotten of fear and fancy, of credulity and ignorance. The terrors excited by the plague could not now be estimated. Some idea may be gleaned only in the later narrative of Defoe. But the uncertainty of information, the growth of rumour, helped to keep alive all the elements of fear, of superstition, of terror, and, in a word, all those elements of strong feeling, vivid impression, and pregnant fancy which are the very thews and sinews of poetry.

The material terrors of death were slight as compared with its ghostly horrors. The air was peopled with mysterious beings of another world. At night these creatures of phantasy were released. The spirits of murdered men, freed from their earthly cerements, walked abroad, to cry for justice against their murderers. The belief in God's overruling justice is perhaps the strongest and most universal instinct of men's nature. This was

expressed in a belief, in its most direct manifesta-
tion-in a form which demanded less faith and patience
than any other that murder would speak "with most
miraculous organ
organ "-that
"-that augury would often reveal the
assassin, even if his own guilty fears and terrors were
not so wrought on as to destroy his peace of mind.

Metaphysics furnished no cause for immoral propensities, rash impulses, or the worst infirmities. Thus

THE DEPTHS OF WISDOM.

537

good intentions were supposed to be frustrated by the spirits of darkness, by elves and goblins. Men attributed false causes to the material pains suffered by their bodies, in which they had their sensations to guide them. How much more were they likely to attribute material promptings in the affairs of the mind, where they saw the result alone. Such and similar beliefs acted on poetry, and poetry again tinged these impressions.

The beautiful and beneficent operations of Nature were associated with the loveliest forms-with fairies of surpassing beauty, who appeared clad in robes of celestial radiance, the emanations of loftier and brighter spheres. There was materialism in all this; but it was materialism of the most poetic and enchanting kind. The belief again held, that man, by knowledge and labour, attained mastery over these powers of the air, potent to raise, direct, and rule spirits. According to the texture of the mind in which these impressions took root was the coarseness or fineness of the resulting picture. The beauty of the photograph depended on the accuracy of the lens, in the perfection of the chemical and artistic combination by which the results were realized. The popular Wizard or necromancer in some minds assumed the form of a malignant enemy to mankind, in others of a learned but mischievous foe or a powerful knight, or a specious ally of the powers of darkness. In the plays of Shakspere, all

these beliefs assumed the noblest, the most dignified form. The Witch of pernicious attributes and grovelling pursuits rises to a tragic grandeur and magnificence. The Magician is merely a scholar who has dared the heights

538

PROSPERO THE WIZARD.

of human wisdom. In the person of Prospero in the
Tempest' he is preternaturally wise, beneficent, removed
from human feeling and sympathy by the very height and
abstraction of his pursuits. But with a Baconian lofti-
ness of thought he has a Baconian iciness about his
heart. Human griefs and joys barely affect him. He
is scarcely susceptible of anger. With tenderness, but
little love for his kind. Having mused too long on the
perishable nature of all things, to feel a special concern
for one.
Thus the poetry of the time absorbed the beliefs
of the time-condensed and embodied its acts; put its
superstitions into verse; enshrined its fears and fancies
in hexameters and alexandrines. And thus the chief of
the poets played and toyed with all these fancies of the
uninformed mind. Enshrined them in his verse, and left
them to the wonder and delight, the reverence and wor-
ship of succeeding generations.

But these were but a few of the causes which gave to the Elizabethan age its distinguishing character, which governed and ruled the poetry of Shakspere, and which subserved the intellect of Francis Bacon.

The discovery of the New World bad given an entirely new direction to enterprise. This and the origin of a fleet in England of any importance, were almost concurrent circumstances. The lands wrested from unknown space opened a field alike to the soldier, the maritime discoverer, the poet, the naturalist, the man of science, and the trader. Mercator and Copernicus had paved the way for utilizing the discovery. Chivalry and interest combined powerfully to stimulate the national ardour, and to open the New World for the benefit and the adventure of the Old.

ZEAL AND ENTERPRISE.

539

Nearly all the great expeditions fitted out in Elizabeth's day were for this destination. They were chiefly at private risk, and often at great loss to the noblemen and gentlemen who planned them.

Essex, and Cumberland, and Howard had wasted their means in maritime ventures. A religious, a national and patriotic zeal combined to keep the light of enterprise alive. The knowledge of remote places on the world's surface was strangely coupled with fiction, strangely impregnated with the phantasies of ignorance early in Elizabeth's day. The list of popular errors, which Sir Thomas Browne catalogues as existing in his day, would give us only a faint notion of the popular notions of distant countries which prevailed a century before. Pliny was not an unfruitful source; he had been in the hands of the schoolmen; and filtered as he had been through the minds of monkish teachers, he had led to the propagation and diffusion of not a few errors. But there had been grafted on his stock a far more luxuriant growth of native origin. Men believed in seas of fire, in regions of thick-ribbed ice —in cannibals; in anthropophagi; in demons of hideous aspect inhabiting remote worlds-in animals of ferocious nature and deadly mien—in tropical marvels that no eye had yet scanned.

What was known of the terrors of Spain, and the mysterious and dreaded Inquisition; of the midnight murders enacted by its bloody tribunal; the tortures that had been brought on the unhappy Netherlanders, that had been seen by the travelled soldier with his own eyes, was calculated to arouse a dread and fear of this haughty nation. The Spanish occupation of America ;—the mas