which the ignorance of the vulgar had
encircled them.

The thrones and shrines, which delusion once sustained even in the
civilized quarter of the globe, are for ever fallen, and that civil and
religious liberty, which in past ages was kept down by the marvellous
exhibitions of science to the senses, is now maintained by its
application to the reason of man. The charlatans, whether they deal in
moral or in physical wonders, form a race which is never extinct. They
migrate to the different zones of the social system, and though they
change their place, and their purposes, and their victims, yet their
character and motives remain the same. The philosophical mind,
therefore, is not disposed to study either of these varieties of
impostors; but the other two families which compose the second class are
objects of paramount interest. The eccentricities and even the
obliquities of great minds merit the scrutiny of the metaphysician and
the moralist, and they derive a peculiar interest from the state of
society in which they are exhibited. Had Cardan and Cornelius Agrippa
lived in modern times, their vanity and self-importance would have been
checked by the forms of society, and even if their harmless pretensions
had been displayed, they would have disappeared in the blaze of their
genius and knowledge. But nursed in superstition, and educated in dark
and turbulent times, when every thing intellectual was in a state of
restless transition, the genius and character of great men necessarily
reflected the peculiarities of the age in which they lived.

Had history transmitted to us correct details of the leading alchemists
and scientific magicians of the dark ages, we should have been able to
analyse their actions and their opinions, and trace them, probably, to
the ordinary principles by which the human mind is in every age
influenced and directed. But when a great man has once become an object
either of interest or of wonder, and still more when he is considered as
the possessor of knowledge and skill which transcend the capacity of the
age, he is soon transformed into the hero of romance. His powers are
overrated, his deeds exaggerated, and he becomes the subject of idle
legends, which acquire a firmer hold on credulity from the slight
sprinkling of truth with which they are seasoned. To disclaim the
possession of lofty attributes thus ascribed to great men is a degree of
humility which is not often exercised. But even when thi