incur censure for the discoveries 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.]

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
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 "Daemonologie," 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 unfortun