the moral tone and metrical regulation of Ford's verse. Whatever the original may have been—and it was probably but a thin and hasty piece of work—it has doubtless suffered from the incongruous matter loosely sewn on to it; and the masque as it stands is too lax and incoherent in structure to be worth much as a sample of its slight kind, or to show if there was anything of more significance or value in the first conception.

"The Witch of Edmonton" is a play of rare beauty and importance both on poetical and social grounds. It is perhaps the first protest of the stage against the horrors and brutalities of vulgar superstition; a protest all the more precious for the absolute faith in witchcraft and devilry which goes hand in hand with compassion for the instruments as well as the victims of magic. Dr. Theodorus Plönnies himself had not a heartier belief in the sorceries of Sidonia von Bork than the poets appear to have in the misdeeds of Mother Sawyer; while neither Meinhold nor any modern writer has shown a nobler abhorrence of the genuinely hellish follies and cruelties which brought forth in natural and regular order fresh crops of witches to torture and burn. Even Victor Hugo could hardly show a more tender and more bitter pity for the sordid: and grovelling agonies of outcast old age and reprobate misery, than that which fills and fires the speech of the wretched hag from the first scene where she appears gathering sticks to warm herself, starved, beaten, lamed and bent double with blows, pitiable and terrible in her fierce abjection, to the last moment when she is led to execution through the roar of the rabble. In all this part of the play I trace the hand of Decker;