[52] He expressly asserts his belief in their existence (A Discourse upon Divels and Spirits, chap. 32, p. 540; cf. chap. 16, p. 514).
[53] Discoverie of Witchcraft, xiii, 22-34, ed. 1584, pp. 321 ff., ed. 1665, pp. 181-201 (with cuts). Most of the tricks which Scot describes are identical with feats of legerdemain that are the stock in trade of every modern juggler:—“To throwe a peece of monie awaie, and to find it againe where you list” (p. 326); “To make a groat or a testor to sinke through a table, and to vanish out of a handkercher very strangelie” (p. 327); “How to deliver out foure aces, and to convert them into foure knaves” (p. 333); “To tell one without confederacie what card he thinketh” (p. 334); “To burne a thred, and to make it whole againe with the ashes thereof” (p. 341); “To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a platter, &c.: which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist” (p. 349). The picture of the apparatus required for the last-mentioned trick is very curious indeed (p. 353). The references to Scot, unless the contrary is stated, are to all the pages of the first (1584) edition, as reprinted by Dr. Brinsley Nicholson (London, 1886).
[54] King James remarks, in the Preface to his Dæmonologie, that Scot “is not ashamed in publike Print to deny, that there can be such a thing as Witch-craft: and so maintaines the old errour of the Sadduces in denying of spirits” (Workes, 1616, pp. 91-92).
[55] In what an orderly way one may proceed from an admission of the doctrine of fallen angels to the final results of the witch dogma may be seen, for instance, in Henry Hallywell’s Melampronoea: or A Discourse of the Polity and Kingdom of Darkness, 1681. Hallywell had been a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge.
[56] See p. 9, above.
[57] P. 39. See Nicholson’s reprint of the 1584 edition, p. xlii.
[58] Page 46.
[59] Introduction to the Chetham Society reprint of Potts’s Discoverie of Witches, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.
[60] Pages 202-215.
[61] P. 228. Perhaps Webster is merely “putting a case” here; but he certainly seems to be making an admission, at least in theory.