As the decline of disorder and of martial tastes had given men the opportunity to lead other than military lives, so the decline of the theological spirit enabled them to attain that diffusion of knowledge without which there could be no civilization.  The Roman clergy, during many centuries, partly from conscientious motives, and partly to maintain their own power, had suppressed intellectual and material advancement, and had kept men in a state of gross ignorance and superstition.  In England the church gradually lost her old influence by her internal rottenness:  she was unable to resist the new growth of learning which sprung up in the first half of the sixteenth century; and her power for evil was destroyed by the Reformation.  The superstitions, however, which she had nourished, lingered long after her power had passed away, and these have given birth to some curious specimens of fiction.  The natural tendency of an ignorant and superstitious people was to ascribe superior mental ability to intercourse with Satan, and to imagine that any unusual learning must be connected with the occult sciences.  These ideas are illustrated by the stories relating to Friar Bacon and to Virgil which were printed during the sixteenth century, and which embodied the legends regarding these great men which had passed current for two hundred years.  The same ignorant indifference to useful learning which made Roger Bacon, the great philosopher of the thirteenth century, “unheard, forgotten, buried,” represented him after his death as a conjurer doing tricks for the amusement of a king.  “The Famous Historie of Frier Bacon,” is written in a clear and simple style, very similar to that of “Thomas of Reading,” and recounts:  “How Fryer Bacon made a Brazen Head to speake, by the which hee would have walled England about with Brasse”; “how Fryer Bacon by his arte took a towne, when the king had lyen before it three months, without doing to it any hurt”; with much more of the same sort.  This story would be without interest, were it not for the introduction of the Friar’s servant, one Miles, whose futile attempts at seconding his master’s efforts, and sometimes at imitating them, occasion some very amusing scenes.  Friar Bungay, the famous conjurer of Edward the Fourth’s time, appears as Bacon’s assistant.

Virgil was treated in the same way.  The age which turned Hercules into a knight-errant, very consistently represented the poet and philosopher as a magician.  All through the Middle Ages the name of Virgil had been connected with necromancy.  “The authors,” says Naudeus,[32] “who have made mention of the magic of Virgil are so many that they cannot be examined one after another, without loss of much time.”  On the title page of the “Lyfe of Virgilius,” we learn that:  “This boke treateth of the lyfe of Virgilius, and of his deth, and many mervayles that he dyd in hys lyfe tyme by whychcrafte and nygramancye thorowgh the helpe of the devyls of Hell.”