Note 194 — GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

Commentaries, book iv, chap. 4, sec. 6 (4th ed., 1770, IV, 60-61); cf. Dr. Samuel A. Green, Groton in the Witchcraft Times, 1883, p. 29. In 1715 and 1716 there appeared, in London, A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft, in two volumes, which asserted the truth, and gave the particulars, of a long line of such phenomena, from the case of the Witches of Warboys (in 1592) to the Salem Witchcraft itself. The book was the occasion of Dr. Francis Hutchinson’s Historical Essay, published in 1718, and in a second edition in 1720. Richard Boulton, the author of the Compleat History, returned to the charge in 1722, in The Possibility and Reality of Magick, Sorcery, and Witchcraft, Demonstrated. Or, a Vindication of a Compleat History of Magick, etc. The Compleat History came out anonymously, but Boulton, who describes himself as “sometime of Brazen-Nose College in Oxford,” acknowledges the authorship in his reply to Hutchinson.