Ver. 444. _Scotists._] So denominated from Johannes Duns Scotus. Erasmus tells us, an eminent Scotist assured him, that it was impossible to understand one single proposition of this famous Duns, unless you had his whole metaphysics by heart. This hero of incomprehensible fame suffered a miserable reverse at Oxford in the time of Henry VIII. That grave antiquary, Mr. Antony Wood (in the vindication of himself and his writings from the reproaches of the Bishop of Salisbury), sadly laments the deformation, as he calls it, of that university, by the King's commissioners; and even records the blasphemous speeches of one of them, in his own words: "We have set Duns in Boccardo, with all his blind glossers, fast nailed up upon posts in all common houses of easement." Upon which our venerable antiquary thus exclaims: "If so be, the commissioners had such disrespect for that most famous author, J. Duns, who was so much admired by our predecessors, and so difficult to be understood, that the doctors of those times, namely, Dr. William Roper, Dr. John Keynton, Dr. William Mowse, &c. professed that, in twenty-eight years' study, they could not understand him rightly, what then had they for others of inferior note?" What indeed! But if so be, that most famous J. Duns was so difficult to be understood (for that this is a most theologic proof of his great worth is past all doubt), I should conceive our good old antiquary to be a little mistaken, and that the nailing up this Proteus of the schools was done by the commissioners in honour of the most famous Duns, there being no other way of catching the sense of so slippery and dodging an author, who had eluded the pursuit of three of their most renowned doctors in full cry after him, for eight and twenty years together. And this Boccardo in which he was confined, seemed very fit for the purpose, it being observed that men are never more serious and thoughtful than in that place of retirement.--Scribl. Ver. 444. _Thomists_,] From Thomas Aquinas, a truly great genius, who, in those blind ages, was the same in theology, that our Friar Bacon was in natural philosophy; less happy than our countryman in this, that he soon became surrounded with a number of dark glossers, who never left him till they had extinguished the radiance of that light, which had pierced through the thickest night of monkery, the thirteenth century, when the Waldenses were suppressed, and Wickliffe not yet risen.