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The tale had become almost a fabliau, but any one who reads the amusing chapter will see that it is based on a belief in disturbances like those familiar to Glanvill and the Misses Fox. 'At dinner, when he would lay his hand on a trencher, it was carried off elsewhere, and the wineglass, when he was about drinking, was snatched from his hand. So Mr.

His opponents were attempting to use common sense, but it was a sort of common sense which, however little they saw it, must undermine the current religious convictions. Glanvill was indeed exceedingly up-to-date in his own time. Not but that he had read the learned old authors.

The need for caution is further emphasized by the important circumstance that of all the phenomena described, only those most susceptible of mundane interpretation were witnessed by Glanvill or Mompesson.

He denies the truth of a report that an imposture was discovered, but admits that when Charles II. sent gentlemen to stay in the house, nothing unusual occurred. But these researchers stayed only for a single night. He denied that any normal cause of the trouble was ever discovered. Glanvill told similar tales about a house at Welton, near Daventry, in 1658.

Ascribed with some probability to Ranulf Glanvill, Henry's chief justiciar during his last years, it was certainly written by some one thoroughly familiar with the law of the time and closely in touch with its enforcement in the king's court.

Glanvill and Webster were protagonist and antagonist in a drama where the others played somewhat the rôle of the Greek chorus. It was in 1677 that Webster put forth The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft. A Non-Conformist clergyman in his earlier life, he seems to have turned in later years to the practice of medicine. From young manhood he had been interested in the subject of witchcraft.

The theme of "Ligeia" was evidently suggested by those lines from Joseph Glanvill which, quoted as a motto for the story, are thrice repeated during the course of the narrative: "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will, pervading all things by nature of its intentness.

Izaak Walton heard the Gypsies talking under the honeysuckle hedge at Waltham, and the beggar virgin singing: "Bright shines the sun, play, beggars play! Here's scraps enough to serve to-day." Glanvill told of the poor Oxford scholar who went away with the Gypsies and learnt their "traditional kind of learning," and meant soon to leave them and give the world an account of what he had learned.

Glanvill insisted upon what he believed were well authenticated facts of experience. James grounded his belief upon a course of theoretical reasoning. We have already indicated that James's book was influential in its time. It goes without saying that his position as a sovereign greatly enhanced its influence. This was particularly true after he took the throne of England.

But the phenomena are nothing less than modern, for Mather, Sinclair, Paracelsus, Wierus, Glanvill, Bovet, Baxter and other old writers are full of precisely these combinations of sounds and sights, while many cases occur in old French literature, old Latin literature, and among races of the lower barbaric and savage grades of culture.