Francis Osborne, a literary man whose reputation hardly survived his century, but an essayist of great fame in his own time,[59] was a man who made his fortune by sailing against rather than with the wind. It was conventional to believe in witches and Osborne would not for any consideration be conventional. He assumed the skeptical attitude,[60] and perhaps was as influential as any one man in making that attitude fashionable. From these lesser lights of the literary world we may pass to notice the attitude assumed by three men of influence in their own day, whose reputations have hardly been dimmed by time, Bacon, Selden, and Hobbes. Not that their views would be representative of their times, for each of the three men thought in his own way, and all three were in many respects in advance of their day. At some time in the reign of James I Francis Bacon wrote his _Sylva Sylvarum_ and rather incidentally touched upon witchcraft. He warned judges to be wary about believing the confessions of witches and the evidence against them. "For the witches themselves are imaginative and believe oft-times they do that which they do not; and people are credulous in that point, and ready to impute accidents and natural operations to witchcraft. It is worthy the observing, that ... the great wonders which they tell, of carrying in the air, transporting themselves into other bodies, &c., are still reported to be wrought, not by incantations, or ceremonies, but by ointments, and anointing themselves all over. This may justly move a man to think that these fables are the effects of imagination."[61] Surely all this has a skeptical sound. Yet largely on the strength of another passage, which has been carelessly read, the great Bacon has been tearfully numbered among the blindest leaders of the blind.[62] A careful comparison of his various allusions to witchcraft will convince one that, while he assumed a belief in the practice,[63] partly perhaps in deference to James's views,[64] he inclined to explain many reported phenomena from the effects of the imagination[65] and from the operation of "natural causes" as yet unknown.[66]