ithout 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 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.]

* * * * *

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 Commentary 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.[A] His majesty terrified "the
tobacconists," as the patriarchs of smoking-clubs were called, 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."[B] 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.

[Footnote A: Not long before James composed his treatise on "Daemonologie,"
the learned Wierus had published an e