Note 127 — THE HISTORY OF HAVEREL WIVES.

A scriptural veneration for old age was long a characteristic of the common people of Scotland; but this remark betrays one of the tenets of the belief in witchcraft hardly consistent with the outward profession of the people. In a curious and interesting work, entitled the History of the Devil, the author says:—‘I think it was a mean, low-priced business for Satan to take up with; below the very Devil: below his dignity as an angelic, though condemned creature; below him even as a Devil, to go to talk to a parcel of ugly, deformed, spightful, malicious old women; to give them power to do mischief, who never had a will, after they entered into the state of old womanhood, to do anything else.’