Explanation: When an old woman begins to do at, and grow chargeable to a parish, She is generally turned into a witch, and fills the whole country with extravagant fancies, imaginary distempers and terrifying dreams.

Answer: These lines have been taken from the essay “On Witchcraft- Story of Moll White” by Joseph Addison who is a great essayist in eighteenth-century English Literature. The essay is a piece of satire on the commonest superstition of the time namely the belief in witchcraft. In the selected lines, Addison has commented on the habit of the country people to treat all the old and weak-minded women as witches.

Addison himself is the spectator. He is not only a spectator but also an observer and a commentator. He is a reformer too. As a prudent spectator, he observes how an old woman is to be considered a witch. He sees that when she starts growing signs of extreme old age, she becomes a liability for the parish. This type of old woman becomes dependent on the parish if she is unable to get a living off her own and does not have anyone to look after her. Then the parishioners start circulating stories about her commerce with evil spirits and attribute all illnesses and mishaps to her. They begin to regard her as a witch and persecute her and fill the whole district with fanciful stories about her. The whole district is filled with stories of illness and bad dreams presumably carved by this.

In fact, the essayist is strongly critical of such behavior on the part of the villagers or parishioners. He feels great sympathy for these old women and would like to look upon them merely as old women but not witches. There is the felicity of Language, clarity of expression, and realism of ideas in these lines.