<pre style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; text-align: left;">Three Friars, says a legend, hid themselves near the
Witch Sabbath orgies that they might count the devils ;
but the Chief of these, discovering the friars, said — c Reve-
rend Brothers, our army is such that if all the Alps, their
rocks and glaciers, were equally divided among us, none
would have a pound's weight.' This was in one Alpine
valley. Any one who has caught but a glimpse of the
world's Walpurgis Night, as revealed in Mythology and
Folklore, must agree that this courteous devil did not
overstate the case. Any attempt to catalogue the evil
spectres which have haunted mankind were like trying to
count the shadows cast upon the earth by the rising sun.
This conviction has grown upon the author of this work at
every step in his studies of the subject.
In 1859 I contributed, as one of the American 'Tracts
for the Times,' a pamphlet entitled 'The Natural History
of the Devil/ Probably the chief value of that essay was
to myself, and this in that its preparation had revealed
to me how pregnant with interest and importance was
the subject selected. Subsequent researches in the same
direction, after I had come to reside in Europe, revealed
how slight had been my conception of the vastness of the
domain upon which that early venture was made. In
1872, while preparing a series of lectures for the Royal <span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">Institution on Demonology, it appeared to me that the </span></pre>
<pre style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; text-align: left;">best I could do was to print those lectures with some
notes and additions; but after they were delivered there
still remained with me unused the greater part of materials
collected in many countries, and the phantasmal creatures
which I had evoked would not permit me to rest from my
labours until I had dealt with them more thoroughly.
The fable of Thor's attempt to drink up a small spring,
and his failure because it was fed by the ocean, seems
aimed at such efforts as mine. But there is another
aspect of the case which has yielded me more encourage-
ment. These phantom hosts, however unmanageable as
to number, when closely examined, present comparatively
few types ; they coalesce by hundreds ; from being at first
overwhelmed by their multiplicity, the classifier finds
himself at length beating bushes to start a new variety.
Around some single form — the physiognomy, it may
be, of Hunger or Disease, of Lust or Cruelty — ignorant
imagination has broken up nature into innumerable bits
which, like mirrors of various surface, reflect the same in
endless sizes and distortions; but they vanish if that
central fact be withdrawn.
In trying to conquer, as it were, these imaginary
monsters, they have sometimes swarmed and gibbered
around me in a mad comedy which travestied their tragic
sway over those who believed in their reality. Gargoyles
extended their grin over the finest architecture, cor-
nices coiled to serpents, the very words of speakers
started out of their conventional sense into images that
tripped my attention. Only as what I believed right
solutions were given to their problems were my sphinxes
laid ; but through this psychological experience it </pre>
