that its effect was any thing but final and complete.  Inveterate error is seldom prostrated by a blow from one hand, and truth seems to be a tree which cannot be forced by planting it before its time.  There was something, too, in the book itself which militated against its entire acceptance by the public.  It is intended to form a little Encyclopaedia of the different arts of imposition practised in Scot’s time; and in order to illustrate the various tricks and modes of cozenage, he gives us so many charms and diagrams and conjurations, to say nothing of an inventory of seventy-nine devils and spirits, and their several seignories and degrees, that the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa himself looks scarcely less appalling, at first sight, than the Discoverie.  This gave some colour to the declamation of the author’s opponents, who held him up as Wierus had been represented before him, as if he were as deeply dipped in diabolical practises as any of those whom he defended.  Atheist and Sadducee, if not very wizard himself, were the terms in which his name was generally mentioned, and as such, the royal author of the Demonology anathematizes him with great unction and very edifying horror.  Against the papists, the satire of Scot had been almost as much directed as against what he calls the “witch-mongers,” so that that very powerful party were to a man opposed to him.  Vigorous, therefore, as was his onslaught, its effect soon passed by; and when on the accession of James, the statute which so long disgraced our penal code was enacted, as the adulatory tribute of all parties, against which no honest voice was raised, to the known opinions of the monarch, Scot became too unfashionable to be seen on the tables of the great or in the libraries of the learned.  If he were noticed, it was only to be traduced as a sciolist, (imperitus dialecticae et aliarum bonarum artium, says Dr. Reynolds,) and to be exposed for imagined lapses in scholarship in an age when for a writer not to be a scholar, was like a traveller journeying without a passport.  Meric Casaubon, who carried all the prejudices of the time of James the first into the reign of Charles the second, but who, though overshadowed by the fame of his father, was no unworthy scion of that incomparable stock, at the same time that he denounces Scot as illiterate, will only acknowledge to having met with him “at friends houses” and “booksellers shops,” as if his work were one which would bring contamination to a scholar’s library.  Scot was certainly not a scholar in the sense in which the term is applied to the Scaligers, Casaubons, and Vossius’s, though he would have been considered a prodigy of reading in these days of superficial acquisition.  But he had original gifts far transcending scholarship.  He had a manly, straightforward, vigorous understanding, which, united with an honest integrity of purpose, kept him right when greater men went wrong.  How invaluable a phalanx would the battalion of folios which the reign of James the first produced now afford us, if the admirable mother-wit and single-minded sincerity of Reginald Scot could only have vivified and informed them.[19]