



Produced by Wendy Crockett, Carlo Traverso, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team, from images
generously made available by the Bibliotheque nationale
de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr.












[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been numbered sequentially and
moved to the end of the text.]




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.


LONDON

Frederick J Mason, 444, West Strand

1834





PREFACE.


The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the
credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be
productive of the most salutary lessons.

One view of the subject will teach us a useful pride in the abundance
of our faculties. Without pride man is in reality of little value. It
is pride that stimulates us to all our great undertakings. Without
pride, and the secret persuasion of extraordinary talents, what man
would take up the pen with a view to produce an important work,
whether of imagination and poetry, or of profound science, or of acute
and subtle reasoning and intellectual anatomy? It is pride in this
sense that makes the great general and the consummate legislator, that
animates us to tasks the most laborious, and causes us to shrink from
no difficulty, and to be confounded and overwhelmed with no obstacle
that can be interposed in our path.

Nothing can be more striking than the