Pierre Bayle, by the article in his _Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_ (1697), which had a very wide influence, probably damned Bruno's reputation for a century. The article on Spinoza also did the same service for the Dutch philosopher, with whom, indeed, Bayle joined Bruno, as having held the same "abominable doctrine" of atheism. He had no real knowledge of Bruno, the biography is frivolous and inexact, and the philosophy--a garbled version--is reported on hearsay.[656] It was Bayle's authority which stamped Bruno with the sarcastic description of "a knight errant in philosophy," which has sometimes been spoken of as a happy touch of Hegel's invention, but really dates back to one Lionardo Nicodemo (1683), who described Bruno as "playing the part of a wandering knight (_i.e._ a travelling scholastic), now here, now there, at different universities in France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, with shield pendant, and lance in rest, challenging the Aristotelians to learned combat."[657] In England the same aspersion upon Bruno's name was stereotyped by an article in the _Spectator_ of May 27, 1712 (one of Budgell's). The writer, however, had the fairness, which Bayle had not, to read Bruno's _Spaccio_ before making reflections upon it. Contrary to his expectations, for Bruno was "a professed atheist, with a design to depreciate religion," he found "very little danger" in it. This did not prevent him from taking Bruno as a text for a would-be humorous disquisition on Atheism. It was John Toland,[658] the "poor denizen of Grub Street," and once famous, or infamous, author of _Christianity not Mysterious_, who in England first paid Bruno something of the respect he deserved. His championship was not, perhaps, of the most discerning or of the most valuable, but it was honest. A copy of the _Spaccio_ had come into his possession,--one which he believed to be the only one then in existence,--and as a result of his reading he claimed Bruno as the founder of free thought. He had studied the sayings on Divine Magic in that work, and had fastened on the fact that Bruno "regarded magic as nothing but a more recondite, non-vulgar, although perfectly natural wisdom." This was certainly true; but Toland added, "So he sometimes calls the eternal vicissitude of material forms Transmigration," which was at least misleading. Among his manuscripts Toland left "an account of Giordano Bruno's Book of the Universe" (_De l' Infinito_), along with a translation of the introductory epistle.[659] And somewhat earlier, in 1713, a translation of the _Spaccio_ was made into English by W. Morehead,[660] who may have been one of Toland's brethren, as the Quarterly Reviewer suggests. Toland himself was, however, believed to be the author. He had visited Lacroze at Berlin in 1706, and had defended the Nolan against that virulent searcher-out of atheists, deists, pantheists, and the like "miscreants and libertines." To a