prosperity now in exchange for the soul at a future time, a tailor of Clitheroe entered into some such agreement with him. At the expiration of the term, however, the tailor having failed to receive any benefit at all from the agreement, asked from his Satanic majesty the boon of "one wish more." It was granted. A dun-horse was grazing hard by, and the ready-witted tailor, pointing to the animal, wished that the devil might ride straight to his own quarters upon it, and never come back to earth to plague mortal. Instantly the horse was bestridden by the Evil One, who speedily rode out of sight, never to return in a bodily shape." (Henderson's "Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties.")1 The devil's partiality for black horses, which appears in so many legends, is illustrated by another story of Michael Scott's dealings with the lower world of spirits, which is also to be found in a note appended to "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." It runs as follows: "He was chosen, it is said, to go upon an embassy, to obtain from the king of France satisfaction for certain piracies committed by his subjects upon those of Scotland. Instead of preparing a new equipage and splendid retinue, the ambassador retreated to his study, opened his book, and evoked a fiend in the shape of a huge black horse, mounted upon his back, and forced him to fly through the air towards France.3 As they crossed the sea, the devil insidiously asked his rider, What it was that the old women of Scotland muttered at bedtime? A less experienced wizard might have answered that it was the Paternoster, which would have licensed the devil to precipitate him from his back. But Michael sternly This legend first appeared in print in Roby's Traditions of Lancashire, with some mistakes, which were corrected by Wm. Dobson in his Rambles by the Ribble, first series. 2 "Our folk-tales," writes Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology (translated by Stallybrass), "make the devil either ride a black steed, or drive in a magnificent car like Wuotan [A.S. Woden] and like Donar " [A.S. Thor]. "So "King Charles [in the Spagna, canto xxi.] rides a devil, converted into a horse, from the East to France in one night." (Grimm, Teut. Myth., translated by Stallybrass, p. 1,028.) A certain St. Antidius, Bishop of Besançon, in the fifth century, who is the subject of one of Southey's ballads, was, it is said, once crossing the sea to Rome, mounted on the devil's back, when the artful tempter tried to make the Bishop utter the name above every name, which, as it breaks all spells, would have enabled him to throw the saint off into the sea; but the latter, knowing what he wanted, only replied, "Gee-up devil!" Gervase of Tilbury (Otia Imperialia, iii. 93) tells of women who asserted that, while their husbands were asleep, they themselves crossed land and sea in the company of evil spirits, and that if anyone during such a flight pronounced the same sacred name, he or she immediately fell down. The writer adds that he had himself seen a woman of Arles who had replied, “What is that to thee?—Mount, Diabolus, and fly!" When he arrived at Paris, he tied his horse to the gate of the palace, entered, and boldly delivered his message. An ambassador, with so little of the pomp and circumstance of diplomacy, was not received with much respect, and the king was about to return a contemptuous refusal to his demand, when Michael besought him to suspend his resolution till he had seen his horse stamp three times. The first stamp shook every steeple in Paris, and caused all the bells to ring; the second threw down three of the towers of the palace; and the infernal steed had lifted his hoof to give the third stamp when the king rather chose to dismiss Michael, with the most ample concessions, than to stand to the probable consequences. It will be remembered, too, that in the legend of the Old Woman of Berkeley, which Southey has turned into verse :— She follow'd her Master to the church door, There stood a black horse there; His breath was red like furnace smoke, The devil he flung her on the horse, And he leapt up before, And away like the lightning's speed they went, And she was seen no more. The demon warrior who wounded the bold baron Osbert, after a nocturnal conflict on the haunted plain of Wandlebury, at the confines of the diocese of Ely, was, as Gervase of Tilbury relates,2 fallen into the Rhone under such circumstances, and was wetted up to her waist, but she escaped with nothing worse than a fright. There is a German legend which illustrates the power of the Paternoster over the devil. A woman of Ronneburg, it is said, was once sorely tempted to purchase a certain chest by signing a receipt for the same with her blood; but, when almost persuaded, she repeated the Lord's Prayer, and at the words "Lead us not into temptation" the seducer fled with a howl of disappointed rage. Here, however, it is the power of intelligent prayer, rather than the utterance of a charm, that prevails; as in Montgomery's lines :— Satan trembles when he sees The weakest saint upon his knees, where the palpable materialism of an earlier age has but evaporated into poetical metaphor. Matthew of Westminster says that it was covered with iron hooks and nails : "Præ foribus niger equus superbe hinniens videbatur, uncis ferreis et clavis undiqe confixus." 2 In Angliâ ad terminos episcopatus Eliensis est castrum Cantabrica nomine, infra cujus limites e vicino lucus est, quem Wandlebiriam dicunt. . . . In hanc mounted on a black charger, with trappings to match, of which Osbert gained possession, after unhorsing his infernal adversary. But at cock-crow the animal suddenly reared, snorting wildly, and spurning the ground with its hoofs; and, breaking the reins which held it fast, set itself free and vanished into space. Of such a sort was the diabolical black horse which vanished with Dando and his dogs in the middle of a river. Dando, it seems, 2 was a wild and worldly priest of former days, attached to the priory church of St. Germans, in East Cornwall. His hunting parties were not his worst irregularities, but one of these it was that led to his ultimate perdition in this wise. One Sunday morning he had been riding hard, as he had so often done before, to the music of hounds and horn, and, becoming tired and thirsty, he called aloud for a draught which was no longer forthcoming, for he had already drained dry his own and his comrades' flasks. But he only grew more urgent in his demands, when he was told how impossible it was to procure any more liquor. "Go to hell for it" was his last suggestion when asked where a supply could be got. The words were no sooner out of his mouth, than "a dashing hunter " suddenly presented himself, and offered the priest a flask which contained, as he said, "some choice liquor distilled in the establishment you speak of." Dando found the beverage so good that he exclaimed, after drinking as much as he could hold : "That was a drink indeed. Do the gods drink such nectar ?" "Devils do," was the ready reply. "Then I wish I were one," muttered Dando, now intoxicated with the infernal mixture. A dispute soon afterwards arising between the priest and the stranger as to the possession of some of the spoils of the chase, the former dismounted, or rather rolled off his horse, rushed up to the other in a furious rage, and after assaulting him in a manner that brought about his own discomfiture, he declared himself willing even to "go to hell" after the quarry which he claimed. "So thou shalt,' campi planitiem, &c." Wallbury Camp in Essex, near Bishop Stortford, seems to have been the place intended, not Wodnesbury, in Wiltshire, as Sir Walter Scott conjectures (introduction to the tale of Tamlane, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border). "Jam galli cantus advenerat, et equus saltibus æstuans, naribus ebulliens, pedibus terram pulsans, loris, quibus tenebatur, disruptis, in nativam recipit se libertatem, &c." (Otia Imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, in vol. i. p. 979 of "Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium," compiled by Leibnitz). similar traditions of demoniacal or ghostly knights connected with the forest of Glenmore in the Scottish Highlands, Norham Castle, and elsewhere. There are ? See Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England, First series, p. 247 ff. said the stranger, and flinging him up before him on his fiery charger, “black as night," he was off like an arrow from the bow. The hounds followed, and leaping into the Lynher, all disappeared in a blaze which made the river boil. The story is embodied in a carved chair which still stands in St. Germans' church. Early on Sunday mornings, too, Dando's ghostly pack may at times be heard and seen scouring the country as if in hot pursuit. In Germany the Junker Rechberger is believed to come out of his grave at midnight, and to hunt through the Black Forest, mounted on the mysterious sable steed which was the cause of his death. In the evidence attesting cases of sorcery, black horses figure almost as prominently as dogs or cats of the same suspicious hue. Thus in 1612 it was thought a clear proof of witchcraft that two suspected women had been seen by two witnesses riding together on a black nag near Northampton. And as late as 1704 a certain Beatrix Laing was denied food and firing as a witch, and died of cold and starvation, because she was said to have come from market to her home at Pittenweem on the back of a coal-black horse, which afterwards vanished with much noise. Belief in the devil's powers of self-transformation has found expression in many another story than those already related. A tolerably long list might be made out of animals which have at different times served his turn in this way. Indeed, according to popular report, there was no creature whose form he might not assume, except that of the lamb or of the dove, as both hallowed by Christian associations. In Goethe's version of the Faust legend it is successively as a black poodle,2 a nondescript monster, and a 'The various animal shapes in which the devil was believed to appear to witches and others comprise, in addition to those mentioned in the text, the wolf, bull, boar, ram, cat, hare, mouse, and hedgehog; the raven, crow, turkey, gander, and drake; the snake and toad; the caterpillar or worm, fly, butterfly, &c. In some of these three are traces of the old Norse mythology, as in the wolf (Fenris), and the raven (the sacred bird of Odin); or of the Bible, as in the serpent and the fly (Beelzebub). Others are appropriate as types of physical or moral deformity, as the hog, the fox, and the toad. Milton's use of this last form will be remembered, when Satan suggests unholy dreams to Eve (Paradise Lost, Book iv. 1. 799 ff.) 2 In the most ancient of the rude frescoes on the walls of the Auerbach Tavern at Leipzig, which represents Faust about to fly off astride a beer-barrel, a black dog appears beside him instead of Mephistopheles in his human aspect. John Stewart, one of the principal witnesses against Margaret Barclay of Irvine, who was accused together with her of sorcery and witchcraft (1618), deposed to having seen the devil in her house "in the shape of a handsome black travelling scholar that Mephistopheles presents himself before him in their first interview. In the earliest printed form of the story (1587) Faust is represented as riding through the air to visit distant countries mounted upon Mephistopheles in the shape of a winged horse. In the Life of Christopher Wagner (1593), which is little more than a repetition of the adventures of his more famous master, the disciple is waited upon by a familiar spirit in the likeness of an ape.2 In Johann Gast's "Convivialium Sermonum Liber" (1544) the writer tells his readers that he had supped with Faust at Basel (Basle), where he was attended by a dog and a horse which were undoubtedly demons. 5 At the Witches' Sabbaths the infernal Master of the Revels was believed to wear the guise of a great he-goat,3 with a black man's✦ face and a pair of black candles burning between his horns. If her demon-lover came to fetch a witch to the place of meeting, he too often assumed the shape of a goat, and carried her thither on his lap-dog, such as ladies used to keep," which followed Margaret and two other women to the sea shore, where certain magical rites were performed, “after which the sea raged, roared and became red like the juice of madder in a dyer's caldron." A little girl who lived as servant with Margaret Barclay also swore that she had seen the black dog, "to whose appearance she also added the additional terrors of that of a black man. The dog also, according to her account, emitted flashes from its jaws and nostrils, to illuminate the witches during the performance of the spell." (Scott's Letters on Demonology, &c. Letter IX.) It was at Wittenberg, or its immediate neighbourhood, that, according to tradition, Faust first met and made his famous compact with Mephistopheles. * Cf. Robert Browning's Ponte dell' Angelo, Venice. 'The he-goat was the sacred beast of Donar [A.S. Thor], "whom the modern notions of the devil so often have in the background." (Grimm's Teut. Myth., translated by Stallybrass). It used to be believed by many, both in England and Scotland, that a he-goat is never to be seen for twenty-four hours on the stretch, as once in that space of time he has to go to the devil and get his beard combed! (Brand's Popular Antiq., vol. ii., p. 517.) 'Doctor John Fian, who, with other persons of rank and position, was accused in 1590 of having attempted by sorcery the death of James VI. of Scotland, "gave an account of a great witch meeting at North Berwick, when the unhallowed crew entered" the church, "and their master the devil appeared to his servants in the shape of a black man occupying the pulpit." Scott's Demonology, &c. Ch. ix.) 5 Belief in the possibility of amatory relations between supernatural and human beings seems to have been founded mainly upon dreams and certain passages of Scripture (Genesis vi. 2; Tobit vi. 14; 1 Cor. xi. 10; and Jude 6). Current fairy tales, like those of Tamlane and Thomas the Rhymer, confirmed the belief; nor was there any clear distinction made between elves, goblins, and demons. Men, however, were thought chiefly liable to be loved by fairies, and women by fiends. In legal proceedings against witches (as at Ravensburg, where forty-eight were burned at one time) there is much loathsome evidence, professing to come |