220 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less 

 eloquent in English than in any other language ; that it was the 

 British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education 

 had been neglected (not the Devil) could not speak ; that 

 Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail 

 with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor 

 that medicine drives him out. Anything more helplessly in 

 adequate than Mr. Offer s preliminary dissertation on Witchcraft 

 we never read ; but we could hardly expect much from an editor 

 whose citations from the book he is editing show that he had 

 either not read or not understood it. 



Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic not sparing, 

 as we have seen, even Priscian s head among the rest ; but, en 

 revanche, Mr. Turnbull is ultramontane beyond the [editors 

 of the Civlitd, Cattolica. He allows himself to say, that, 

 after Southwell s death, one of his sisters, a Catholic in 

 heart, but timidly and blamably simulating heresy, wrought, 

 with some relics of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted 

 with desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the skill 

 of all physicians. Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a recent con 

 vert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a 

 lucrative practice in countries full of the relics of greater saints 

 than even Southwell. That father was hanged (according to 

 Protestants) for treason, and the relic which put the whole phar 

 macopoeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. 

 But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and however it 

 may gratify Mr. Turnbull s catechumenical enthusiasm to exalt 

 the curative properties of this integument of his, even at the 

 expense of Jesuits bark, we cannot but think that he has shown 

 a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his 

 hero s life, or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It 

 is possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a necktie 

 only to heretical readers. 



We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. Turnbull 

 and Offor for special animadversion because they are on the 

 whole the worst, both of them being offensively sectarian, while 

 that of Mr. Offor in particular gives us almost no information 

 whatever. Some of the others are not without grave faults, 

 chief among which is a vague declamation, especially out of 

 place in critical essays, where it serves only to weary the reader 

 and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither s Hal 

 lelujah, for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that * nearly all the 

 best poets of the latter half of the sixteenth century for that 



