FOOTNOTES
[46] So the witch in ‘Macbeth’ (Act I., sc. 3) says:
‘In a sieve I’ll thither sail.’
[47] It is a singular circumstance, as Pitcairn remarks, that in almost all the confessions of witches, or at least of the Scottish witches, their initiation, and many of their meetings, are said to have taken place within churches, churchyards, and consecrated ground; and a certain ritual, in imitation, or mockery, of the forms of the Church, is uniformly said to have been gone through.
[48] In the Forfarshire reports, alluded to on p. [332], the witches always speak of the devil’s body and kiss as deadly cold.
[49] Pitcairn remarks, with justice, that the above details are, perhaps, in all respects the most extraordinary in the history of witchcraft of this or of any other country. Isabel Gowdie must have been a woman with a powerful and rank imagination, who, had she lived in the present day, might, perhaps, have produced a work of fiction of the school of Zola.
[50] There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.
[51] These, it is needless to say, were pure inventions, and by no means amusing ones.