appears to have been in many respects a wicked and criminal hypocrite. When he had completed his confession, he avowed solemnly that he had not confessed the hundredth part of the crimes which he had committed. From this time he would answer no interrogatory, nor would he have recourse to prayer, arguing, that as he had no hope whatever of escaping Satan, there was no need of incensing him by vain efforts at repentance. His witchcraft seems to have been taken for granted on his own confession; as his endictment was chiefly founded on the same document, in which he alleged he had never seen the Devil, but any feeling he had of him was in the dark. He received sentence of death, which he suffered 12th April, 1670, at the Gallow-hill, between Leith and Edinburgh. He died so stupidly sullen and impenitent, as to justify the opinion that he was oppressed with a kind of melancholy frenzy, the consequence perhaps of remorse, but such as urged him not to repent, but to despair. It seems probable that he was burned alive. His sister, with whom he was supposed to have had an incestuous connexion, was condemned also to death, leaving a stronger and more explicit testimony of their mutual sins than could be extracted from the Major. She gave as usual, some account of her connexion with the queen of the fairies, and acknowledged the assistance she received from that sovereign in spinning an unusual quantity of yarn. Of her brother, she said, that one day a friend called upon them at noonday with a fiery chariot, and invited them to visit a friend at Dalkeith, and that while there her brother received information of the event of the battle of Worcester. No one saw the style of their equipage except themselves. On the scaffold, this woman, determining, as she said, to die "with the greatest shame possible," was with difficulty prevented from throwing off her clothes before the people, and with scarce less trouble was she flung from the ladder by the executioner.

Her last words were in the tone of the sect to which her brother had so long affected to belong: "Many," she said, "weep and lament for a poor old wretch like me; but alas! few are weeping for a broken Covenant."

The Scottish prelatists, upon whom the Covenanters used to throw many aspersions respecting their receiving proof against shot from the Devil, and other infernal practices, rejoiced to have an opportunity, in their turn, to retort on their adversaries the charge of sorcery. Dr. Hickes, the author of "Thesaurus Septentrionalis," published on the subject of Major Weir, and the case of Mitchell, who fired at the Archbishop of St. Andrews, his book called "Ravaillac Redivivus," written with the unjust purpose of attaching to the religious sect to which the wizard and assassin belonged the charge of having fostered and encouraged the crimes they committed or attempted.

It is certain that no story of witchcraft or necromancy, so many of which occurred near and in Edinburgh, made such a lasting impression on the public mind, as that of Major Weir. The remains of the house in which he and his sister lived are still shown at the head of the Westbow, which as our readers may perceive from looking at the frontispiece, has a gloomy aspect, well suited for a necromancer. It was at different times a brasier's shop, and a magazine for lint, and in my younger days was employed for the latter use; but no family would inhabit the haunted walls as a residence; and bold was the urchin from the High-School who dared approach the gloomy ruin, at the risk of seeing the Major's enchanted staff parading through the old apartments, or hearing the hum of the necromantic wheel, which procured for his sister such a character as a spinner. At the time I am writing, this last fortress of superstitious renown is in the course of being destroyed, in order to the modern improve

ments now carrying on in a quarter long thought unimprovable.

As knowledge and learning began to increase, the gentlemen and clergy of Scotland became ashamed of the credulity of their ancestors, and witch trials, although not discontinued, more seldom disgrace our records of Criminal Jurisprudence.

Sir John Clerk, a scholar and an antiquary, the grandfather of the late celebrated John Clerk of Eldin, had the honour to be among the first to decline acting as a commissioner on the trial of a witch, to which he was appointed so early as 1678,* alleging, dryly, that he did not feel himself warlock (that is, conjurer) sufficient to be a judge upon such an inquisition. Allan Ramsay, his friend, and who must be supposed to speak the sense of his many respectable patrons, had delivered his opinion on the subject in the "Gentle Shepherd," where Mause's imaginary witchcraft constitutes the machinery of the poem.

Yet these dawnings of sense and humanity were obscured by the clouds of the ancient superstition on more than one distinguished occasion. In 1676, Sir George Maxwell of Pollock, apparently a man of melancholic and valetudinary habits, believed himself bewitched to death by six witches, one man and five women, who were leagued for the purpose of tormenting a clay image in his likeness. The chief evidence on the subject was a vagabond girl, pretending to be deaf and dumb. But as her imposture was afterward discovered, and herself punished, it is reasonably to be concluded that she had herself formed the picture or image of Sir George, and had hid it, where it was afterward found, in consequence of her own information. In the mean time, five of the accused were executed; and the sixth only escaped on account of extreme youth.

*See Fountainhall's Decisions, vol. i. p. 15.

A still more remarkable case occurred at Paisley, in 1697, where a young girl, about eleven years of age, daughter of John Shaw of Bargarran, was the principal evidence. This unlucky damsel, beginning her practices out of a quarrel with a maid-servant, continued to imitate a case of possession so accurately, that no less than twenty persons were condemned upon her evidence, of whom five were executed, besides one John Reed, who hanged himself in prison, or, as was charitably said, was strangled by the Devil in person, lest he, should make disclosures to the detriment of the service. But even those who believed in witchcraft were now beginning to open their eyes to the dangers in the present mode of prosecution. "I own," says the Rev. Mr. Bell, in his MS. Treatise on Witchcraft, "there has been much harm done to worthy and innocent persons in the common way of finding out witches, and in the means made use of for promoting the discovery of such wretches, and bringing them to justice; so that oftentimes old age, poverty, features, and ill fame, with such like grounds not worthy to be represented to a magistrate, have yet moved many to suspect and defame their neighbours, to the unspeakable prejudice of Christian charity; a late instance whereof we had in the west, in the business of the sorceries exercised upon the Laird of Bargarran's daughter, anno 1697, a time when persons of more goodness and esteem than most of their calumniators were defamed for witches, and which was occasioned mostly by the forwardness and absurd credulity of diverse otherwise worthy ministers of the gospel, and some topping professors in and about the city of Glasgow."*

Those who doubted of the sense of the law, or reasonableness of the practice, in such cases, began

*Law's Memorialls, edited by C. K. Sharpe, Esq., Prefatory Notice,

P. 93.

to take courage, and state their objections boldly. In the year 1704, a frightful instance of popular bigotry occurred at Pittenweem. A strolling vagabond, who affected fits, laid an accusation of witchcraft against two women, who were accordingly seized on, and imprisoned with the usual severities. One of the unhappy creatures, Janet Cornfoot by name, escaped from prison, but was unhappily caught, and brought back to Pittenweem, where she fell into the hands of a ferocious mob, consisting of rude seamen and fishers. The magistrates made no attempts for her rescue, and the crowd exercised their brutal pleasure on the poor old woman, pelted her with stones, swung her suspended on a rope between a ship and the shore, and finally ended her miserable existence by throwing a door over her as she lay exhausted on the beach, and heaping stones upon it till she was pressed to death. As even the existing laws against witchcraft were transgresssed by this brutal riot, a warm attack was made upon the magistrates and ministers of the town, by those who were shocked at a tragedy of such a horrible cast. There were answers published, in which the parties assailed were zealously defended. The superior authorities were expected to take up the affair, but it so happened, during the general distraction of the country concerning the Union, that the murder went without the investigation which a crime so horrid demanded. Still, however, it was something gained that the cruelty was exposed to the public. The voice of general opinion was now appealed to, and, in the long run, the sentiments which it advocates are commonly those of good sense and humanity.

The officers in the higher branches of the law dared now assert their official authority, and reserve for their own decision cases of supposed witchcraft, which the fear of public clamour had induced them formerly to leave in the hands of inferior judges,