Need we say to what an extent lithography is carried now? To what perfection it is brought is evident by a comparison of the etchings of Otto Speckler's designs to the German edition of Puss in Boots,' and the lithographed drawings in the English edition. We have now before us perhaps the only specimen of photography, strictly speaking, which exists; a bank note engraved by the action of light upon metal, and printed in our presence by the common process. Five lustres more, and in what terms may this specimen be mentioned? It opens a strange vision! Coloured and decorative printing, which we remember as existing only in the comparatively rude specimens given in Savage's work, is now brought to great excellence and is common. We have seen some specimens of a proposed work by Mr. Humphreys, on illuminated manuscripts, which have surprised us by the accuracy of their execution and the effect obtained by merely mechanical

means.

ILLUSTRATION is now about to be practised on a gigantic, at least upon a national, scale. We are to have a pictorial history of England on the walls of the houses of parliament. In the name of all the unities we hope and trust that no gross anachronisms, no real absurdities, may be perpetrated in fresco by any youth of twenty-two, or of the maturer age of forty-two, or of the too ripe age of sixty-two. Let us at the least avoid the errors of the French Versailles.* Let us not represent the naked Picts' in 'painted vests.' In the very proper, most proper, wish to obtain excellence in art, let us not shock common sense. We know that we are not likely again to be presented with ceilings and walls

'Where sprawl the gods of Verrio and Laguerre;'

but we are naturally fearful that excellence of design or richness and depth of colour may be allowed to cover defects. We have, however, great confidence in some of the commission.

Some fifty, or sixty, or seventy years since, an offer was made by the members of the Royal Academy (we are not sure whether in their corporate capacity or as individuals) to paint or illustrate the inside of St. Paul's Cathedral. The offer was declined, but we know not with certainty upon what grounds. In the fifteenth century Jean Gerson, the Chancellor of Paris, had good reason to object to the introduction of ridiculous pictures into churches; but still they existed in numbers, and of such a nature as, perhaps, to warrant the Genevese reformers in going to extremes, in wishing the destruction of the good or harmless-in fact of allin order to ensure the destruction of the positively bad. The

*See Quarterly Review,' vol. lxi. p. 1.

The inside of the dome was painted by Sir James Thornhill, and is now in a sad state of dilapidation. His original sketches are still preserved, and might, if necessary, be used in the restoration of the paintings.

Council

Council of Trent made one good regulation on the subject-the bishops were charged with the responsibility- Tanta circa hæc diligentia et cura ab episcopis adhibeatur ut nihil inordinatum, aut præpostere et tumultuarie accommodatum, nihil profanum, nihilque inhonestum appareat; cum domum Dei deceat sanctitudo. Hæc ut fidelius observentur, statuit sancta Synodus nemini licere ullo in loco vel ecclesiâ, etiam quo modo libet exemptâ, ullam insolitam ponere vel ponendam curare imaginem, nisi ab Episcopo approbata fuerit.'*" We wish that this rule had been so far carried into effect, even in the English Church, that no statue nor monument, even although ordered and approved and paid for by parliament, should have been introduced, as from the nature of some we presume they must have been, into St. Paul's Cathedral, without the sanction of the bishop. We cannot avoid the expression of our wish that they might be transferred as so many Illustrations' to the new houses of parliament, unquestionably the fitter receptacle for monuments to the praise and glory of man, for such undoubtedly and properly, in their nature, they are. One more instance of Illustration,' and we close this paper, A short year since and a church, we will not name its locality, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, was re-opened. Some stained windows had been added. The circular of the vicar stated, that the eastern window of this church, now completed with stained glass, is designed to illustrate the service for Trinity Sunday. The centre opening has reference principally to the Lessons, the side openings to the Gospel and Epistle.' The canon of the Tridentine Council might have been useful here. These are not the Illustrations' we want,

ART. VII.-Maria Schweidler die Bernstein-hexe, der interessanteste aller bisher bekannten Hexenprocesse, herausgegeben von W. Meinhold, Doctor der Theologie, und Pfarrer.-(Maria Schweidler, the Amber Witch: the most interesting Trial for Witchcraft yet known. Edited by W. Meinhold, Doctor of Divinity and Parish Priest.) Berlin, 1843.

IF this little work be genuine, it is undoubtedly, as it announces itself, the most interesting of all those strange trials for witchcraft, so absorbing, and sometimes so inexplicable, which occur at a certain period in almost every country in Europe; if it be a fiction, it is worthy, we can give no higher praise, of De Foe. The editor, as we understand, is or was the pastor of Coserow, in Usedom, an island on the coast of Pomerania, separated from the mainland by

Sess. xxv. Decretum de invocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis Sanctorum et sacris imaginibus.

a channel

á channel of no great width. Dr. Meinhold professes to have found the manuscript in a manner by no means improbable, yet rather too like that which the author of Waverley, as well as many others of inferior name, have been so fond of playing off upon us. It was brought to him by his sexton (Kuster) out of a niche or closet in the church, where it had long lain hid among a heap of old hymnbooks and useless parish accounts. The sexton had been in the habit of tearing a leaf or two out of it whenever the pastor, as on the present occasion, wanted a piece of loose paper. But even in the account of the discovery there is a quiet circumstantiality so like truth as almost to lull the suspicions arising out of our familiarity with these common artifices. I thought at first,' says the editor, to throw the story of my Amber Witch into the form of a novel; but luckily I soon said to myself, Why should I do so? Is not the history itself more interesting than any novel can be?'

The worthy pastor has judged wisely. We have read nothing for a long time in fiction or in history which has so completely riveted and absorbed our interest as this little volume of about 300 pages. Though the language in which it is written, the low German of Pomerania, mingled, as our editor informs us, with some idioms of Swabia (from whence he supposes his predecessor, Pastor Schweidler, to have originally come), embarrassed us considerably-it was impossible to lay the book down. We could scarcely pause to look out the meaning of uncommon or provincial words. Nor was it the mere curiosity to know the end, which in our younger days held us breathless over volume after volume of indifferent romance, but which we have now lost from the fatal certainty of conjecture acquired by our confirmed and insatiate bad habit of novel-reading. This unerring divination enabled us to see the catastrophe of some of the Waverley novels, even, it might seem, before the author had settled it himself; and makes us bear with patience the month that elapses between the separate numbers of Dickens; howbeit that gentleman so far abuses his privilege as to leave us in the middle of a murder. That prophetic tact, which in ordinary cases discerns at once the parentage of all ambiguous children, assorts the couples with as much confidence as if we had heard their banns published, and brings home his crimes to the villain of the romance with a fine dexterity, which might move the envy of Vidocq himself, is certainly kept in rare suspense by the catastrophe of the Amber Witch.' But this is far from its greatest attraction; it is rather the apparent genuineness, to which at times we have been tempted to pledge ourselves, the singular truth and reality of the whole detail, the absolute life-like nature of every circumstance, of every action and every word, the succession of minute, quiet, unlaboured touches, with the exquisite homely beauty of the

leading

leading characters, the Pastor and his daughter, their piety, their charity, their affection, their virtue so quaintly blended with their weaknesses and superstitions.-All this is the unrivalled charm throughout this little book, incommunicable, we fear, in any translation-we are quite sure in any brief abstract we may be enabled to give in our journal. Who could translate it? Scarcely even Mrs. Austin. The somewhat antiquated and provincial language, with its odd pedantic scraps of Latin, is a part of its truth and actuality, and could hardly be preserved by a translator, unless by uncommon care and felicity, without harshness and affectation.

The Pastor himself, good old Abraham Schweidler, reminds us of the Vicar of Wakefield, with a touch, it may be, of his namesake the worthy Mr. Adams, and perhaps of Manzoni's Dón Abbondio-but his life is cast in much ruder times, and in a much simpler state of society. The daughter strikes us as perfectly original; we must not anticipate the developement of her character, which will appear in our brief outline of the story, but we know scarcely any maiden in history or romance at once so ideally beautiful, yet so completely akin to our common sympathies; at once so admirable in all her trials, yet so mere a village girl, with a girlish love of fine clothes, a sort of pretty pedantry characteristic of the times, and a heart ready to yield itself up unrestrained to a virtuous passion.

But, as we hinted above, the whole cast of the story, be it real or imaginary, is more like De Foe; though what it is which constitutes this likeness, whence the peculiar truthfulness which they possess in common, it is not so easy to define. As in De Foe, every person is an actual individual, every place an actual place. There is not an abstract personage, not a mute, or a man merely designated by his trade, occupation, or office. Everybody is introduced by name, and though we never heard the name before, we seem almost to recognise an old acquaintance, so completely and instantaneously do his words and actions let us know all about him. We have not the slightest doubt, not merely of his existence, but of his being that one individual. The beadle is not merely the real beadle of Coserow, but Jacob Knake and no one else. The Pastor Benzenzis is like old Abraham Schweidler, yet not old Abraham. So likewise there is no description of places, yet we have every locality with all its minute particulars at once before us. If there be a part of the world of which we were utterly ignorant, it is the coast of Pomerania, yet just as we know more about old London from De Foe's History of the Plague,' and of low London life from his Colonel Jack,' than from pages of antiquarian lore, so from this little book, in which there is not a line of description, we think we know the Streckelberg, the way to it,

its

its juniper-bushes, its caverns, and its sea-shore, certainly far better than if we had studied the best geographical treatise or local guide. This book has no 'illustrations'-and it needs none.

It is time, however, to come to our story. The scene lies in the island of Usedom, at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. This was the period in which the belief in witchcraft was most profound and undoubting. Horst indeed in that strange compilation, his Zauber Bibliothek,' says that from about 1610 to 1660, in the German Protestant countries, chiefly in the smaller states, the free cities, and the towns and villages under the jurisdiction of the military orders, and the co-hereditary districts (ganerblichen ortschaften), the greatest number of witches were burned. This was the case at the same time in the German Catholic provinces. It was as if the two churches, at this period of the highest excitement, in the midst of the unspeakable miseries of the Thirty Years' War, rivalled each other in holy zeal against the Devil and his sworn adherents the poor witches.'vol. ii. p. 149. We believe that Dr. Meinhold is in the right that in Germany at least the Protestant were worse in this respect than the Catholic districts, as if the people sought to compensate to themselves for the superstitions which they had abandoned, and the indelible love of persecution which clung to their yet unenlightened hearts, by their more undoubting faith in these monstrous inventions, and by burning miserable old women by hundreds. Nothing seems more in favour of the authenticity of this book, or better imagined, if it be a fiction, than the unbounded and unhesitating faith of the whole community as to the actual power of witches, their formal compact, and their intimate intercourse with the Evil One. The only question, as we shall soon see, between the Pastor and his daughter, and some of their enemies, is who was the witch, and who therefore ought to be burned.

The story, it must be understood, is told by Abraham Schweidler, the Lutheran pastor of Coserow; the date, early in the thirty years' war. Some leaves at the beginning of the MS. had been torn out, but luckily the tale commences just at the moment which makes us immediately acquainted with the most important personages. The parish has been suddenly attacked by a troop of imperial soldiers, who, with the wanton barbarity usual in those cruel wars, wasted and destroyed everything. Trunks, drawers, cupboards, were all knocked about and broken to pieces; my surplice (priesterhemd) was torn; so that I was in the greatest misery and tribulation.' The pastor had happily concealed his little daughter (mein armes Töchterlein) from these lawless ruffians, who, if an elderly cornet had not interfered, were disposed to insult even Ilse the maid, though she was above 50 years old :

-

I thanked, therefore, my Maker, when these wild guests were off,

that