Cithaeron and Taygetus were mountains, the one in Boeotia and the other in Laconia.
[121]: 18. The Bastile (modern spelling, Bastille). The famous prison, for prisoners of state, in Paris; destroyed at the beginning of the French Revolution, July 14, 1789. The 14th of July is still a national holiday in France.
[123]: 19. Midsummer Night's Dream, iv. 1. 124.
[126]: 20. Threw down his pole. Such of the hunters as followed the chase on foot usually carried long vaulting poles, by the aid of which they could leap hedges, ditches, or miry places, and thus, by going cross country, often keep as close to the dogs as the mounted huntsmen. See Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, Chap. xxiii.
[127]: 7. Pascal. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French geometrician and philosopher, and one of the most acute thinkers of his century. His later years were passed in the celebrated community of Port Royal, where his metaphysical and religious works were written. After his death, a number of fragmentary papers intended for a work in defence of Christianity, which he did not live to finish, were collected and published under the title Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion (Thoughts of Pascal upon Religion). It is from the seventh section (Misère de l'homme) of this work that the quotation in the text is taken.
127: 27. Too great an application to his studies in his youth. Pascal wrote a famous Latin treatise on Conic Sections at the age of sixteen, invented a calculating machine at the age of nineteen, and before he was twenty-one was accounted one of the first mathematicians of the world. But he says that from the age of eighteen he never passed a day without pain.
[128]: 10. Lines out of Mr. Dryden. John Dryden (1631-1700), the representative English poet of the last half of the seventeenth century. The lines quoted are from his Epistle XV, to his cousin of the same name as himself, John Dryden of Chesterton, a robust, fox-hunting bachelor. The epistle is a good example of Dryden's masculine common-sense.
XVI. The Coverley Witch
Motto. "They make their own visions."—Virgil, Eclogues, viii. 108.
[129]: 9. The subject of witchcraft. The Spectator was less credulous, on this matter of witchcraft, than most of his contemporaries. The witchcraft craze in Salem, Massachusetts, occurred in 1692; only a few years before this paper was written, two women had been hanged in Northampton, England, for witchcraft; and as late as 1716 a certain Mrs. Hicks and her daughter were executed in Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, etc. The statute of James I, 1603, punishing witchcraft by death, was not repealed until 1736; and the belief in witchcraft continued to be common long after that, not only among the ignorant, but among the educated. John Wesley, on most matters a man of very sound practical judgement, writes in his Journal as late as 1770: "I cannot give up to all the Deists in Great Britain the existence of witchcraft till I give up the credit of all history, sacred and profane. And at the present time I have not only as strong but stronger proofs of this from eye and ear witnesses than I have of murder; so that I cannot rationally doubt of one any more than the other." And Samuel Johnson, when questioned by Boswell on the matter, while he would "not affirm anything positively upon the subject," reminded Mr. Boswell that in support of witchcraft "You have not only the general report and belief, but many solemn, voluntary confessions." (Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, April 9, 1772.)