s fail to put them aside without a considerably higher
estimate than he had before of the ability of the most learned
king that ever occupied the British throne--a monarch
unapproached by any of his successors, save William III., in any
sort of intellectual power.

Yet here our admiration for James I. must perforce stop. For of
many of his ideas the only excuse is that they were those of his
age; and this is an excuse that is fatal to a claim to the
highest order of merit. All men to some extent are the sport and
victims of their intellectual surroundings; but it is the mark of
superiority to rise above them, and this James I. often failed to
do. He cannot, for instance, in this respect compare with a man
whose works he persecuted, namely, Reginald Scot, who in 1584
published his immortal _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, a book which,
alike for its motive as its matter, occupies one of the highest
places in the history of the literature of Europe.

Yet Scot was only a Kentish country gentleman, who gave himself
up solely, says Wood, to solid reading and the perusal of obscure
but neglected authors, diversifying his studies with agriculture,
and so producing the first extant treatise on hops. Nevertheless,
he is among the heroes of the world, greater for me at least than
any one of our most famous generals, for it was at the risk of
his life that he wrote, as he says himself, "in behalf of the
poor, the aged, and the simple"; and if he has no monument in our
English Pantheon, he has a better and more abiding one in the
hearts of all the well-wishers of humanity. For his reading led
him to the assault of one of the best established, most sacred,
yet most stupid, of the superstitions of mankind; and to have
exposed both the folly of the belief, and the cruelty of the
legal punishments, of witchcraft, more justly entitles his memory
to honour than the capture of many stormed cities or the butchery
of thousands of his fellow-beings on a battlefield.

How trite is the argument that this or that belief must be true
because so many generations have believed it, so many countries,
so many famous men,--as if error, like stolen property, gained a
title from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension
with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for
every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says,
"are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract
of time hath fostered, it is so