Note 130 — GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

I refer to such remarks as the following:—“As the devil lost his empire among us in the last age, he exercised it with greater violence among the Indian Pawwaws, and our New England colonists” (Richard Gough, British Topography, 1780, II, 254, note ᵖ); “The colonists of [Massachusetts] appear to have carried with them, in an exaggerated form, the superstitious feelings with regard to witchcraft which then [at the time of the settlement] prevailed in the mother country” (Introduction to the reprint of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, in the Library of Old Authors, 1862); “In the dark and dangerous forests of America the animistic instinct, the original source of the superstition, operated so powerfully in Puritan minds that Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World and the Salem persecution surpassed in credulity and malignity anything the mother country could show” (Ferris Greenslet, Joseph Glanvill, New York, 1900, pp. 150-151); “The new world, from the time of its settlement, has been a kind of health resort for the worn-out delusions of the old.... For years prior to the Salem excitement, European witchcraft had been prostrate on its dying bed, under the watchful and apprehensive eyes of religion and of law; carried over the ocean it arose to its feet, and threatened to depopulate New England” (George M. Beard, The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement, New York, 1882, p. 1).