These dismal fancies, which the barbarians carried out with them in their migrations into the North-west, took the readier and the faster hold of men’s minds, from the kindred darkness into which the Western world was then fallen, and from the desolation (so apt to engender all fearful conceits and apprehensions) which every where attended the incursions of those ravagers.
Lastly, before the Romancers applied themselves to dress up these dreadful stories, Christian superstition had grown to its height, and had transferred on the magic system all its additional and supernumerary horrors.
Taking, now, the whole together, you will clearly see what we are to conclude of the Gothic system of prodigy and enchantment; which was not so properly a single system, as the aggregate,
—of all that nature breeds
Perverse; all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Which fables yet had feign’d or fear conceiv’d.
For, to the frightful forms of ancient necromancy (which easily travelled down to us, when the fairer offspring of pagan invention lost its way, or was swallowed up in the general darkness of the barbarous ages) were now joined the hideous phantasms which had terrified the Northern nations; and, to complete the horrid groupe, with these were incorporated the still more tremendous spectres of Christian superstition.
In this state of things, as I said, 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 comparisons, that they must manage ill indeed, not to surpass, in this walk of magical incantation, the original classic fablers.
But, if you require a comparison, I can tell you where it is to be made, with much ease, and to great advantage: I mean, in Shakespear’s Macbeth, where you will find (as his best critic observes) “the Danish or Northern, intermixed with the Greek and Roman enchantments; and all these worked up together with a sufficient quantity of our own country superstitions. So that Shakespear’s Witch-Scenes (as the same writer adds) are like the charms they prepare in one of them: where the ingredients are gathered from every thing shocking in the natural world; as here, from every thing absurd in the moral.”
Or, if you suspect this instance, 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 make the comparison himself, and whose word, as he gives it in honest prose, may surely be taken.
In a work of B. Jonson, which he calls The Masque of Queens, there are some Witch-scenes; written with singular care, and in emulation, as it may seem, of Shakespear’s; but certainly with the view (for so he tells us himself) of reconciling the practice of antiquity to the neoteric, and making it familiar with our popular witchcraft.
This Masque is accompanied with notes of the learned author, who had rifled all the stores of ancient 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.