Notes on witchcraft

See J acobs's Introduction, pp. Xlu-xliii. The question whether Howell's letters were actually sent to the persons to whom they are addressed or whether they are to be regarded merely as literary exercises composed during his imprisonment (see Jacobs, pp. Lui does not afiect, for our purposes, the value of the quotations here made, since the letters to which we now refer actually purport to have been written in the Fleet, and since they were first published in the second edition (1650) in the additional third volume and from the nature of things could not have appeared in the first edition They must, at all events, have been composed before 1650, and are doubtless dated correctly enough.