Bad. If thou wilt give me thy soule, I will give thee gold enough.
Good. Thy gold will scald my fingers.
Bad. If thou wilt give me thy soule, I will give thee dice, and thou shalt winne infinite somes of treasure by play.
Good. If thou canst make every letter in this booke Bad. That I cannott. Good. Laudes, laudes, laudes! Bad. Thou shalt have ladies enough—ladies, ladies, ladies!... Good. If thou canst make every letter in this book a ladie, I will. Here the Bad Spirit made an attempt to cast away the book, but, after a violent struggle, was defeated; and then the Good Spirit celebrated his victory in ‘the sweetest musicke that ever was heard.’ Eventually Ball was captured, and Dinham then declared that his ‘two voices’ ceased to trouble him. Greedie and Ball were both committed for trial, but no record exists of their execution, and we may hope that they were acquitted of charges supported by such absurd and fallacious evidence. Edward Fairfax, a man of ability and culture—the refined and melodious translator of Tasso’s Christian epic—prosecuted six of his neighbours at York Assizes, in 1622, for practising witchcraft on his children. The grand jury found a true bill against them, and the accused were brought to trial. But the judge, who had been privately furnished with a certificate of their ‘sober behaviour,’ contrived so to influence the jury as to obtain a verdict of acquittal. The poet afterwards published an elaborate defence of his conduct. His folly may be excused, perhaps, since even such men as Raleigh and Bacon inclined towards a belief in witchcraft; and the judicious Evelyn makes it one of his principal complaints against solitude that it created witches. Hobbes, in his ‘Leviathan,’ takes, however, a more enlightened view: ‘As for witches,’ he says, ‘I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can.’