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ful time, as SHAKESPEAR fpeaks, enabled APULEIUS to outdo LUCAN himself, in fome of his magic fcenes and exhibitions.

NEXT, you will obferve that a fresh and exhauftlefs fwarm of the direft fuperftitions took their birth in the frozen regions of the north, and were naturally enough conceived in the imaginations of a people involved in tenfold darkness, I mean, in the thickeft fhades of ignorance, as well as in the gloom of their comfortless woods and forefts. I call thefe the direft fuperftitions; for though the fouth and eaft may have produced fome that fhew more wild and fantastic, yet those of the north have ever been of a more fombrous and horrid afpect, agreeably to the fingular circumstances and fituation of that favage and benighted people.

THESE

THESE difmal fancies, which the bar barians carried out with them in their migrations into the north-weft, took the readier and the fafter hold of men's minds, from the kindred darkness into which the western world was then fallen, and from the defolation (fo apt to engender all fearful conceits and appre. henfions) which every where attended the incurfions of those ravagers.

LASTLY, before the Romancers applied themselves to dress up these dreadful ftories, Chriftian fuperftition had grown to its height, and had transferred on the magic fyftem all its additional and fupernumerary horrors.

TAKING, now, the whole together, you will clearly fee what we are to conclude of the Gothic fyftem of prodigy and enchantment; which was not fo perly a fingle fyftem, as the aggregate,

pro

-of

--of all that nature breeds

Perverfe; all monftrous, all prodigious things, Which fables yet had feign'd or fear conceiv'd. For, to the frightful forms of antient necromancy (which eafily travelled down to us, when the fairer offspring of pagan invention loft its way, or was swallowed up in the general darkness of the bar barous ages) were now joined the hideous phantafms which had terrified the northern nations; and, to complete the horrid groupe, with these were incorporated the still more tremendous spectres of Chriftian fuperftition.

In this ftate of things, as I faid, the Romancers went to work; and with these multiplied images of terror on their minds, you will conclude, without being at the pains to form particular comparifons, that they must manage ill indeed, not to surpass, in this walk of magical incantation, the original claffic fablers.

BUT,

6

BUT, if you require a comparison, I can tell you where it is to be made, with much eafe, and to great advantage: I mean, in SHAKESPEAR'S Macbeth, where you will find (as his beft critic obferves) "the Danish or Northern, intermixed "with the Greek and Roman enchant"ments; and all these worked up toge"ther with a fufficient quantity of our ❝own country fuperftitions. So that "SHAKESPEAR'S Witch-Scenes (as the "fame writer adds) are like the charm "they prepare in one of them: where "the ingredients are gathered from "every thing fhocking in the natural "world, as here, from every thing ab"furd in the moral."

Or, if you fufpect this inftance, as deriving somewhat of its force and plausibility from the magic hand of this critic, you may turn to another in a great poet of that time; who has been at the pains

to

to make the comparison himself, and whose word, as he gives it in honeft profe, may furely be taken.

In a work of B. JONSON, which he calls THE MASQUE OF QUEENS, there are fome Witch-fcenes; written with fingular care, and in emulation, as it may feem, of SHAKESPEAR'S; but certainly with the view (for fo he tells us himself) of reconciling the practice of antiquity to the neoteric, and making it familiar with our popular witchcraft.

THIS Mafque is accompanied with notes of the learned author, who had rifled all the ftores of antient and modern Dæmonomagy, to furnish out his entertainment; and who takes care to inform us, under each head, whence he had fetched the ingredients, out of which it is compounded.

VOL. III.

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