[Footnote 12:  Few authors are better deserving of an extended biography, a desideratum which, in an age characterised by its want of literary research, is not likely to be soon supplied, than Thomas Erastus, whose theological, philosophical, and medical celebrity entitle him to rank with the greatest men of his century.  At present we have to collect all that is known of his life from various scattered and contradictory sources.  John Webster, in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, contrary to the usual candour and fairness of his judgments, speaks slightingly of Erastus.  There was, however, a sufficient reason for this.  Erastus had shown up the empiricism of Webster’s idol Paracelsus, and was in great disfavour with the writers of the Anti-Galenic school.]

[Footnote 13:  I cannot concur with Mr. Hallam in the extremely low estimate he forms of the literary merit of Bodin’s Demomanie, which he does not seem to have examined with the care and impartiality which he seldom is deficient in.  Like all Bodin’s works, it has a spirit peculiarly his own, and is, in my opinion, one of the most entertaining books to be found in the circle of Demonology.]

In his treatise De Lamiis, published in 1577, 8vo., he defends nearly all the absurdities of the system with a blind zealotry which in such a man is very remarkable.  His book has accordingly taken its place on the same shelf with Sprenger, Remigius, Delrio, and De Lancre, and deserves insertion only in a list which has yet to be made out, and which if accurately compiled would be a literary curiosity, of the singularly illogical books of singularly able reasoners.  What was left unaccomplished by the centurions of literature came ultimately from the strangest of all possible quarters; from the study of an humble pupil of the transmuter of metals and prince of mountebanks and quacks—­the expounder of Reuchlin de verbo mirifico, and lecturer in the unknown tongues—­the follower of Trismegistus—­cursed with bell, book and candle, by every decorous Church in Christendom—­the redoubted Cornelius Agrippa; who, if he left not to his pupil Wierus the secret of the philosopher’s stone or grand elixir, seems to have communicated a treasure perhaps equally rare and not less precious, the faculty of seeing a truth which should open the eyes of bigotry and dispel the mists of superstition, which should stop the persecution of the helpless and stay the call for blood.  If, in working out this virgin ore from the mine, he has produced it mixed up with the scoria of his master’s Occult Philosophy; if he gives us catalogues of devils and spirits, with whose acquaintance we could have dispensed; if he pleads the great truth faintly, inconsistently, imperfectly, and is evidently unaware of the strength of the weapons he wields; these deductions do not the less entitle Wierus to take his place in the first rank of Humanity’s honoured professors, the true philanthropists and noble benefactors of mankind.