James, who, in 1597, issued his _Dæmonologie_ specially against it. Whether Elizabeth or the authorities under her took any notice of it is doubtful, for, as I have said, he was still an Esquire in 1587; and the last words of his will, “for greate is the trouble my poor wief hath had with me, and small is the comforte she hath receyved at my hands”, and his designation of himself as “gent.”, point rather to a voluntary surrender of his office, through weakness and ill-health, than to a dismissal. But zeal for the truth, as he believed it, combined with his fears for himself, for he believed that he had been the object of witchcraft and of the machinations of the evil powers more than once, though luckily in vain, led the royal author on the other side to cause Scot’s book to be burned by the common hangman; and, as is also said by Cole, not one copy alone, as significant of its character, and of its being a _liber prohibitus_ in the eyes of this Protestant Pope, but as many as could be laid hands upon. While, too, I have as yet found no direct proof of this latter statement, it is perhaps in some degree confirmatory of it, that no copies of the book exist in the library of St. Paul’s Cathedral, nor in that of Lambeth Palace, nor in that of Sion College. To the same cause is most likely due the exceedingly neat copy of various chapters, and parts of chapters, contained in the Sloane MS., ff. 2189, in the British Museum, its date according to the experts there being _circa_ 1620. At one time I had suspected that these extracts had been made with the intent of writing a book either for or against the truth of witchcraft; but the methodical neatness of all but the first two or three pages, the manner in which the typographical form of the book is followed, the consecutive, though broken manner, in which the extracts follow one another, the absence of any word or any sign of remark or comment throughout, now cause me to hold that it was a copy made by or for one who took such portions as he wished from a book otherwise inaccessible.