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 elaborate work on the subject. “De praestigiis Daemonum et incantationibus et Veneficiis,” &c., 1568.  He advanced one step in philosophy by discovering that many of the supposed cases of incantation originated in the imagination of these sorcerers—­but he advanced no farther, for he acknowledges the real diabolical presence.  The physician, who pretended to cure the disease, was himself irrecoverably infected.  Yet even this single step of Wierus was strenuously resisted by the learned Bodin, who, in his amusing volume of “Demonomanie des Sorciers,” 1593, refutes Wierus.  These are the leading authors of the times; who were followed by a crowd.  Thus James I. neither wanted authorities to quote nor great