In other instances, there is as little doubt, that
they were the final results of irritation, agony, and despair.[61] The
confessions are generally composed of "such stuff as dreams are made
of," and what they report to have occurred, might either proceed, when
there was no intention to fabricate, from intertwining the fantastic
threads which sometimes stream upon the waking senses from the land of
shadows, or be caused by those ocular hallucinations of which medical
science has supplied full and satisfactory solution. There is no
argument which so long maintained its ground in support of witchcraft
as that which was founded on the confessions referred to. It was the
last plank clung to by many a witch-believing lawyer and divine. And
yet there is none which will less bear critical scrutiny and
examination, or the fallacy of which can more easily be shown, if any
particular reported confession is taken as a test and subjected to a
searching analysis and inquiry.
[Footnote 61: The confession in the "Amber Witch" is a true picture,
drawn from the life. What is there, indeed, unlike truth in that
wonderful fiction?]
It is said that we owe to the grave and saturnine Monarch, who
extended his pardon to the seventeen convicted in 1633, that happy
generalisation of the term, which appropriates honourably to the sex
in Lancashire the designation denoting the fancied crime of a few
miserable victims of superstition.
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