liquity of the ecliptic,
his result being honourably alluded to by Copernicus. [Sidenote: The
University of Paris causes the expulsion of the Jews from France.] The
animosity of the French ecclesiastics against the Jewish physicians at
last led to the banishment of all the Jews from France, A.D. 1306. "It
was," say the historians of this event, "a most revolting spectacle to
see so many learned men, who had adorned and benefited France,
proscribed, wanderers without a country or an asylum. Some of them
expired of grief upon the road. Abba Mari gives in his work
heart-rending details of the expulsion of the Jews from Montpellier, at
the head of whom were the professors and doctors of the faculty."

[Sidenote: Result that they had accomplished.] But, though thus driven
into exile, these strangers had accomplished their destiny. They had
silently deposited in France their ideas. They had sapped the credulity
of the higher classes in Europe, and taught them to turn away from the
supernatural. A clear recognition of their agency in this matter
fastened upon them the watchful eye of Inquisition, and made them the
victims of its tyranny.

And so it might well be. Out of the Spanish peninsula there had come
across the Pyrenees an intellectual influence, which reached the
populace under the form of a fresh and pleasing literature, and the
better classes by novel but unorthodox ideas. To a very great extent the
Jews had been its carriers. The result was the overthrow of
supernaturalism. [Sidenote: Destruction of fairies by tobacco.] We shall
hardly accept the affirmation of good Catholics that fairies disappeared
on account of the Reformation, unable to bear the morose sectarianism
with which it was accompanied, or the still more material explanation of
the rustics that it was through the introduction of tobacco. However
that may be, no longer is Robin Goodfellow the compeller of household
duties--no longer do bad elves sit by the dying embers of the
hearth-stone at night, in the shape of shrivelled frogs, after the
family have gone to bed. For a long time there have been no miracles in
Europe. Even Rome, the workshop of those artifices, has ceased to be the
seat of that trade.

From human institutions of any kind, a great principle, firmly inwrought
and inwoven at the beginning, can never be removed. It will show itself
whenever occasion permits. The animosity between the Byzantine
ecclesiastical system and all true wisdom wa