I have been thus particular in holding forth the decidedly magical and theurgic character of the Alexandrian School of Platonists, in the second and third centuries, as it is easy to perceive that the revival of the Platonic, or rather Neo-Platonic philosophy, on occasion of the restoration of learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had a principal share in the formation of the theosophic and magical views of the sixteenth century, which it is my intention here to characterise. The world had become heartily sick of the eternal boom-booming of the Aristotelian bitterns.[*i4] The hungry spirit of man, aroused from its lethargic slumber, demanded some more vital nourishment than the skeleton distinctions of a thought-dissecting logic, and the vain pomposity of a learned terminology, could afford; and when such men as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio had taught the world to prefer the fulness of poetical life to the nakedness of scholastic speculation, no wonder that Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, when brought into the West by the learned fugitives of Constantinople, should have received a hearty welcome, and exercised a deep-spread influence over the philosophy of the succeeding centuries. Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, and Marsilius Ficinus, are well known as the three principal restorers of the Platonic philosophy in the fifteenth century: but it deserves especially to be remarked, that these men were far from being pure worshippers of their great master, but mixed it up with the theurgic dreamings of Jamblichus and Porphyry, nay, even went as far back as Pythagoras and Hermes Trismegistus, and held the simple Platonic doctrines as of comparatively little consequence, unless taken in connection with the mighty system which, out of such strange materials, had been built up by the Neo-Platonists.[*i5]