I actually said idfic in my comment and then took it out again!
You were not wrong!
(Now Google Books has just clammed up on me and refused to admit there are any 19C books containing the phrase whatsoever. Gah.)
"Blind man's buff with the Devil" looks like it might be its own phrase: I can find it attested here in 1833 in the collected sermons of the Reverend William Howels, whom I've never heard of, and here in an 1818–19 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, describing the trickster Harlequin. "Blind man's buff with the Devil in the dark" comes from The North American Review and looks like the witch-trial history you were talking about. The quotation marks used by the author make it look like a well-known phrase, but I really can't tell. Availability on Google Books is not the most reliable documentation of historical popularity.
no subject
You were not wrong!
(Now Google Books has just clammed up on me and refused to admit there are any 19C books containing the phrase whatsoever. Gah.)
"Blind man's buff with the Devil" looks like it might be its own phrase: I can find it attested here in 1833 in the collected sermons of the Reverend William Howels, whom I've never heard of, and here in an 1818–19 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, describing the trickster Harlequin. "Blind man's buff with the Devil in the dark" comes from The North American Review and looks like the witch-trial history you were talking about. The quotation marks used by the author make it look like a well-known phrase, but I really can't tell. Availability on Google Books is not the most reliable documentation of historical popularity.