crapulis, partim vino, lustrisque ita confectus fuit, ut quotiescunq. conscendere suggestum ad maledicendum, velim precandum [vel imprecandum?] suis, opus erat illi duobus aut tribus viris, a quibus elevandus atq. sustendandus erat.” De Vita et Moribus atque Rebus Gestis Hæreticorum {326} nostri temporis. Authore Jacobo Laingæo Scoto Doctore Sorbonico, fol. 113, b. 114, a, b. 115, a. Parisiis, 1581. Cum Privilegio. Nor were such accounts confined to that age. In the beginning of the following century, they were repeated by John Hamilton. Facile Traictise, contenand ane infallible reul to discern trew from fals religion, p. 60. Louvain, 1600. In 1623, an English writer refers to James Laing’s work for an authentic account of Knox’s private life. The Image of bothe Churches, Jherusalem and Babell, by P. D. M. p. 134. Tornay, 1623. And as late as 1628, we find Father Alexander Baillie retailing, in the English language, all the gross tales of his predecessors, with additions of his own, in which he shows a total disregard to the best‑known facts in the Reformer’s life. “Jhon Knox,” says he, “being chaplane to the laird of Balvurie, and accused for his vices and leecherie, was found so guiltie and culpable that to eschevie the just punishment prepared for him he presently fled away into Ingland.” He afterwards says, that Knox, after the death of his second wife, [that is, twenty years at least after his own death,] “shamefully fell in the abominable vice of incestuous adultery, as Archib. Hamilton and others doe witnesse;” and as a proof that Knox reckoned this vice no blot, Baillie puts into his mouth a gross defence of it, in the very words which Sanders, in his book against the Anglican Schism, had represented Sir Francis Brian as using in a conversation with Henry VIII. Baillie’s True Information of the Unhallowed Offspring, Progress, and Impoison’d Fruits of our Scottish‑Calvinian Gospel and Gospellers, p. 14, 41. Wirtsburgh, 1628.