Volume 1
Lives of the necromancers, or, An account of the most eminent persons in successive ages who have claimed for themselves, or to whom has been imputed by others, the exercise of magical power / By William Godwin.
- William Godwin
- Date:
- 1834
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lives of the necromancers, or, An account of the most eminent persons in successive ages who have claimed for themselves, or to whom has been imputed by others, the exercise of magical power / By William Godwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.
465/496 page 441
![of which I treat is properly of human credulity ; and this infirmity of our nature can scarcely be more forcibly illustrated than in the following ex- ample. It is recorded by the well-known John Bunyan, in a fugitive tract of his, entitled the Life and Death of Mr. Badman, but which has since been inserted in the works of the author in two volumes folio. - In minuteness of particularity and detail it may vie with almost any story which hu- man industry has collected, and human simplicity has ever placed upon record. ‘‘’There was,” says my author, ‘‘a poor woman, by name Dorothy Mateley, who lived at a small village, called Ashover, in the county of Derby. The way in which she earned her subsistence, was by washing the rubbish that came from the lead-mines in that neighbourhood through a sieve, which labour she performed till the earth had passed the sieve, and what remained was particles and small portions of genuine ore. ‘This woman was of exceedingly low and coarse habits, and was noted to be a profane swearer, curser, liar and thief; and her usual way of asserting things was with an imprecation, as, ‘I would I might sink into the earth, if it be not so,’ or, ‘I would that God would make the earth open and swallow me up, if I tell an untruth.’ ‘«¢ Now it happened on the 23rd of March, 1660, [according to our computation 1661 ], that she was washing ore on the top of asteep hill about a quar-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33289207_0001_0465.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
