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 dialecticæ 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]

[Footnote 18: In the epistle to his kinsman Sir Thomas Scot, prefixed
to his _Discoverie_, he observes:--