clined to a union of parties. More than once he silenced the angry tongue of Bancroft, and tempered the zeal of others; and even commended when he could Dr. Reynolds, the chief of the Puritans; the king consented to the only two important articles that side suggested; a new catechism adapted to the people-"Let the weak be informed and the wilful be punished," said the king; and that new translation of the Bible which forms our present version. “But," added the king, "it must be without marginal notes, for the Geneva Bible is the worst for them, full of seditious conceits; Asa is censured for only deposing his mother for idolatry, and not killing her." Thus early the dark spirit of Machiavel had lighted on that of the ruthless Calvin. The grievances of our first dissenters were futile—their innovations interminable; and we discover the king's notions, at the close of a proclamation issued after this conference. "Such is the desultory levity of some people, that they are always languishing after change and novelty, insomuch that were they humoured in their inconstancy, they would expose the public management, and make the administration ridiculous." Such is the vigorous style of James the First in his proclamations; and such is the political truth, which will not die away with the conference at Hampton Court.

These studies of polemical divinity, like those of the

could turn off, with a miserable jest, the open avowal of his love of pluralities. Another, Neile, bishop of Lincoln, when any one preached who was remarkable for his piety, desirous of withdrawing the king's attention from truths he did not wish to have his Majesty reminded of, would in the sermon time entertain the king with a merry tale, which the king would laugh at, and tell those near him, that he could not hear the preacher for the old bishop; prefixing an epithet explicit of the character of these merry tales. Kennet has preserved for us this "rank relation," as he calls it; not, he adds, but,

"we have had divers hammerings and conflicts within us to leave it

out."

KENNET'S History of England, ii. 729.

ancient scholastics, were not to be obtained without a robust intellectual exercise. James instructed his son Charles,* who excelled in them; and to those studies Whitelocke attributes that aptitude of Charles I. which made him so skilful a summer-up of arguments, and endowed him with so clear a perception in giving his decisions.

THE WORKS OF JAMES THE FIRST.

WE now turn to the writings of James the First. He composed a treatise on demoniacs and witches; those dramatic personages in courts of law. James and his council never suspected that those ancient foes to mankind could be dismissed by a simple Nolle prosequi. "A Commen

* That the clergy were somewhat jealous of their sovereign's interference in these matters, may be traced. When James charged the chaplains, who were to wait on the prince in Spain, to decline, as far as possible, religious disputes, he added, that " should any happen, my son is able to moderate in them." The king, observing one of the divines smile, grew warm, vehemently affirming, "I tell ye, Charles shall manage a point in controversy with the best studied divine of ye all." What the king said, was afterwards confirmed on an extraor. dinary occasion, in the conference Charles I. held with Alexander Henderson, the old champion of the kirk. Deprived of books, which might furnish the sword and pistol of controversy, and without a chaplain to stand by him as a second, Charles I. fought the theological duel; and the old man, cast down, retired with such a sense of the learning and honour of the king, in maintaining the order of episcopacy in England, that his death, which soon followed, is attributed to the deep vexation of this discomfiture. The veteran, who had succeeded in subverting the hierarchy in Scotland, would not be apt to die of a fit of conversion; but vexation might be apoplectic in an old and sturdy disputant. The king's controversy was published; and nearly all the writers agree he carried the day. Yet some divines appear more jealous than grateful: Bishop Kennet, touched by the esprit du corps, honestly tells us, that "some thought the king had

tary on the Revelations," which was a favourite speculation then, and on which greater geniuses have written since his day. "A Counterblast to Tobacco !" the title more ludicrous than the design.* His Majesty terrified "the tobacconists," as the patriarchs of smoking-clubs were called,

been better able to protect the church, if he had not disputed for it." This discovers all the ardour possible for the establishment, and we are to infer that an English sovereign is only to fight for his churchmen. But there is a nobler office for a sovereign to perform in ecclesiastical history-to promote the learned and the excellent, and repress the dissolute and the intolerant.

*Not long before James composed his treatise on "Dæmonologie," the learned Wierus had published an elaborate work on the subject. "De præstigiis Dæmonum et incantationibus et Vaneficiis," &c. 1568. He advanced one step in philosophy by discovering that many of the supposed cases of incantation originated in the imagination of these sorcerers—but he advanced no farther, for he acknowledges the real diabolical presence. The physician, who pretended to cure the disease, was himself irrecoverably infected. Yet even this single step of Wierus was strenuously resisted by the learned Bodin, who, in his amusing volume of "Demonomanie des Sorciers," 1593, refutes Wierus. These are the leading authors of the times; who were followed by a crowd. Thus James I. neither wanted authorities to quote nor great minds to sanction his "Dæmonologie," first published in 1597. To the honour of England, a single individual, Reginald Scot, with a genius far advanced beyond his age, denied the very existence of those witches and demons in the curious volume of his " Discovery of Witchcraft," 1584. His books were burned! and the author was him. self not quite out of danger; and Voetius, says Bayle, complains that when the work was translated into Dutch, it raised up a number of libertines who laughed at all the operations and the apparitions of devils. Casaubon and Glanvil, who wrote so much later, treat Scot with profound contempt, assuring us his reasonings are childish, and his philosophy absurd! Such was the reward of a man of genius combating with popular prejudices! Even so late as 1678, these popular superstitions were confirmed by the narrations and the philo. sophy of Glanvil, Dr. More, &c. The subject enters into the Commentaries on the Laws of England. An edict of Louis XIV. and a statute by George II. made an end of the whole Diablerie. Had James I. adopted the system of Reginald Scot, the king had probably been branded as an atheist king!

and who were selling their very lands and houses, in an epidemical madness, for " a stinking weed," by discovering that "they were making a sooty kitchen in their inward parts." And the king gained a point with the great majority of his subjects, when he demonstrated to their satisfaction that the pope was antichrist. Ridiculous as these topics are to us, the works themselves were formed on what modern philosophers affect to term, the principle of utility; a principle which, with them indeed, includes everything they approve of, and nothing they dislike.

It was a prompt honesty of intention to benefit his people, which seems to have been the urgent motive that induced this monarch to become an author, more than any literary ambition; for he writes on no prepared or permanent topic, and even published anonymously, and as he once wrote "post-haste," what he composed or designed for practical and immediate use; and even in that admirable treatise on the duties of a sovereign, which he addressed to prince Henry, a great portion is directed to the exigencies of the times, the parties, and the circumstances of his own court. Of the works now more particularly noticed, their interest has ceased with the melancholy follies which at length have passed away; although the philosophical inquirer will not choose to drop this chapter in the history

* Harris, with systematic ingenuity against James I. after abusing this tract, as a wretched performance, though himself probably had written a meaner one-quotes the curious information the king gives of the enormous abuse to which the practice of smoking was carried, expressing his astonishment at it. Yet, that James may not escape bitter censure, he abuses the king for levying a heavy tax on it to prevent this ruinous consumption, and his silly policy in discouraging such a branch of our revenues, and an article so valuable to our plantations, &c. As if James I. could possibly incur censure for the dis. coveries of two centuries after, of the nature of this plant! James saw great families ruined by the epidemic madness, and sacrificed the revenues which his crown might derive from it, to assist its suppression. This was patriotism in the monarch.

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of mankind. But one fact in favour of our royal author is testified by the honest Fuller and the cynical Osborne. On the king's arrival in England, having discovered the numerous impostures and illusions which he had often referred to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system of Dæmonologie," and at length recanted it entirely. With the same conscientious zeal James had written the book, the king condemned it; and the sovereign separated himself from the author, in the cause of truth; but the clergy and the parliament persisted in making the imaginary crime felony by the statute, and it is only a recent act of parliament which has forbidden the appearance of the possessed and the spae-wife.

But this apology for having written these treatises need not rest on this fact, however honourably it appeals to our candour. Let us place it on higher ground, and tell those who asperse this monarch for his credulity and intellectual weakness, that they themselves, had they lived in the reign of James I., had probably written on the same topics, and felt as uneasy at the rumour of a witch being a resident in their neighbourhood!

POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS OF THE AGE.

THIS and the succeeding age were the times of omens and meteors, prognostics and providences-of "day-fatality," or, the superstition of fortunate and unfortunate days, and the combined powers of astrology and magic. It was only at the close of the century of James I. that Bayle wrote a treatise on comets, to prove that they had no influence in the cabinets of princes: this was, however, done with all the precaution imaginable. The greatest minds were then sinking under such popular superstitions; and whoever has read much of the private history of this age will have smiled at their ludicrous terrors and bewildered