Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott].

  • Walter Scott
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    protection of blessed saints and angels, or of holy men, yet in the flesh, but already anticipating the privileges proper to a state of beatitude and glory, and possessing the power to work miracles. To show the extreme grossness of these legends, we may give an example from the romance of Richard Cceur de Lion, premising, at the same time, that, like other romances, it was written in what the author designed to be the style of true history, and was addressed to hearers and readers, not as a tale of fiction, but a real narrative of facts, so that the legend is a proof of what the age esteemed credible, and were disposed to believe, as much as if it had been extracted from a graver chronicle. The renowned Saladin, it is said, had despatched an embassy to King Richard, with the present of a colt, recommended as a gallant war-horse, challenging Coeur de Lion to meet him in single combat between the armies, for the purpose of deciding at once their pretensions to the land of Palestine, and the theolo- gical question, whether the God of the Christians, or Jupiter, the deity of the Saracens, should be the future object of adoration by the subjects of both monarchs. Now, under this seemingly chivalrous defiance was concealed a most unknightly stratagem, and which we may, at the same time, call a very clumsy trick for the Devil to be concerned in. A Saracen clerk had conjured two devils into a mare and her colt, with the instruction, that whenever the mare neighed, the foal, which was a brute of uncom- mon size, should kneel down to suck his dam. The enchanted foal was sent to King Richard, in the be- lief that, the foal obeying the signal of its dam as usual, the Soldan, who mounted the mare, might get an easy advantage over him. But the English king was warned by an angel in a dream of the intended stratagem, and the colt was, by the celestial mandate, previously to the combat, conjured in the holy name, to be obedient to his rider