The true criterion here must doubtless be sought in the evidence furnished by contemporaries regarding the fact alleged. In the case of Michael Scot such evidence is forthcoming, but we may say at once that it proves upon examination to yield a distinctly negative result. His fame in those days was such that he is mentioned by several important writers of his own age, such as Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Vincent of Beauvais. None of these has a word to say of Scot’s reputation as a necromancer. Some may urge that an argument from silence is unsatisfactory; but does it not gain great force from the consideration that two of these witnesses are decidedly hostile to Scot? Bacon, especially, seems to have lost no opportunity of blackening his character. To these men Michael Scot was a sciolist, a mere pretender to knowledge, ignorant even of Latin; the very charlatan of the schools. He was a plagiarist too; one who passed off the work of another man as his own; nay, darker than all, he was a heretic, or so Albert would make him; a philosopher who interpreted and exceeded the forbidden doctrines of Averroës. Is it not certain that, if Scot had really practised magic in spite of the prohibitions of the Church, we should have heard of this charge from these active and bitter detractors? Our conclusion from their silence is therefore neither far to seek nor hard to defend. These tales, we must hold, were not current in the lifetime of Michael Scot, nor for many years after. They had no foundation in fact, but were the fancies of the following generation, and thus passed into the settled tradition which has ever since persistently associated itself with the philosopher’s name. But this conclusion raises another question. How did such a tradition arise, and what were the points of attachment to which these stories clung? The ground for the legend of Michael Scot would seem to have been prepared by the close connection between him and his master the Emperor Frederick II. Every student of those times knows well the storm of invective and the weight of calumny which fell upon that great monarch as the consequence of his feuds with the See of Rome. He was officially declared to be no Christian but the mystic Beast of the Apocalypse, vomiting blasphemies. He was accused of having produced the apocryphal work _De Tribus Impostoribus_. His private life became the subject of grave scandal and repeated censure. Men were taught to believe that he revelled in a harem of Saracen beauties, and was addicted to infamous immorality, as well as to forbidden arts. These accusations were current, not only in Frederick’s own lifetime, but long afterwards. They may be studied at large in the Papal Epistolaries,[266] and a striking example of their current popular form is found in the following barbarous lines which we borrow from an obscure author[267] who used his pen in the service of the Guelfs: