Note 1 — GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

That the New Englanders brought their views on demonology and witchcraft with them from the Mother Country is a self-evident proposition, but it may be worth while to refer to a striking instance of the kind. The Rev. John Higginson, writing from Salem to Increase Mather in 1683, sends him two cases for his Illustrious Providences,—both of which he “believes to be certain.” The first is an account of how a mysterious stranger, thought to be the devil, once lent a conjuring book to “godly Mr. [Samuel] Sharp, who was Ruling Elder of the Church of Salem allmost 30 years.” The incident took place when Sharp was a young man in London. The second narrative Mr. Higginson “heard at Gilford from a godly old man yet living. He came from Essex, and hath been in N. E. about 50 years.” It is a powerfully interesting legend of the Faust type, localised in Essex. In a postscript Mr. Higginson adds, “I had credible information of one in Leicestershire, in the time of the Long Parliament, that gave his soul to the Divel, upon condition to be a Famous Preacher, which he was for a time, &c., but I am imperfect in the story.” (Mather Papers, Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, VIII, 285-287). See also the cases of witchcraft before 1692 collected in S. G. Drake’s Annals of Witchcraft in New England. Dr. Poole is far nearer the truth in saying that “the New-England colonists had no views concerning witchcraft and diabolical agency which they did not bring with them from the Old World” (Witchcraft in Boston, in Winsor, Memorial History of Boston, II, 131) than President White is when he remarks that “the life of the early colonists in New England was such as to give rapid growth to the germs of the doctrine of possession brought from the mother country” (Warfare of Science with Theology, II, 145).