Scene XII. passes in King Henry's Court, and the royal consent is

given to Earl Lacy's marriage with the Fair Maid, which is fixed to take place on the same day as Prince Edward's marriage to the Princess Elinor. In Scene XIII. we again go back to Bacon's cell. The friar is bewailing the destruction of his Brazen Head to Friar Bungay, when two young gentlemen, named Lambert and Sealsby, enter, in order to look into the 'glass prospective,' and see how their fathers are faring. Unhappily, at this very moment, the elder Lambert and Sealsby, having quarrelled, are engaged 'in combat hard by Fressingfield,' and stab each other to the death, whereupon their sons immediately come to blows, with a like fatal result. Bacon, deeply affected, breaks the magic crystal which has been the unwitting cause of so sad a catastrophe, expresses his regret that he ever dabbled in the unholy science, and announces his resolve to spend the remainder of his life 'in pure devotion.'

At Fressingfield, in Scene XIV., the opportune arrival of Lacy and his friends prevents Margaret from carrying out her intention of retiring to the nunnery at Framlingham, and with obliging readiness she consents to marry the Earl. Scene XV. shifts to Bacon's cell, where a devil complains that the friar hath raised him from the darkest deep to search about the world for Miles, his man, and torment him in punishment for his neglect of orders.

Miles makes his appearance, and after some comic dialogue, intended to tickle the ears of the groundlings, mounts astride the demon's back, and goes off to ----! In Scene XVI., and last, we return to the Court, where royalty makes a splendid show, and the two brides--the Princess Elinor and the Countess Margaret--display their rival charms. Of course the redoubtable friar is present, and in his concluding speech leaps over a couple of centuries to make a glowing compliment to Queen Elizabeth, which seems worth quotation:

'I find by deep prescience of mine art, Which once I tempered in my secret cell, That here where Brute did build his Troynovant,[20] From forth the royal garden of a King Shall flourish out so rich and fair a bud, Whose brightness shall deface proud Phoebus' flower, And overshadow Albion with her leaves. Till then Mars shall be master of the field, But then the stormy threats of war shall cease: The horse shall stamp as careless of the pike, Drums shall be turned to timbrels of delight; With wealthy favours Plenty shall enrich The strand that gladded wandering Brute to see, And peace from heaven shall harbour in these leaves That gorgeous beautify this matchless flower: Apollo's heliotropian[21] then shall stoop, And Venus' hyacinth[22] shall vail her top; Juno shall shut her gilliflowers up, And Pallas' bay shall 'bash her brightest green; Ceres' carnation, in consort with those, Shall stoop and wonder at Diana's rose.'[23]

So much for Greene's comedy of 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay'--not, on the whole, a bad piece of work.

* * * * *

Among the earlier English alchemists I may next name, in chronological order, George Ripley, canon of Bridlington, who, in 1471, dedicated to King Edward III. his once celebrated 'Compound of Alchemy; or, The Twelve Gates leading to the Discovery of the Philosopher's Stone.' These 'gates,' each of which he describes in detail, but with little enlightenment to the uninitiated reader, are:--1. Calcination; 2. Solution; 3. Separation; 4. Conjunction; 5. Putrefaction; 6. Congelation; 7. Cibation; 8. Sublimation; 9. Fermentation; 10. Exaltation; 11. Multiplication; and 12. Projection. In his old age Ripley learned wisdom, and frankly acknowledged that he had wasted his life upon an empty pursuit. He requested all men, if they met with any of the five-and-twenty treatises of which he was the author, to consign them to the flames as absolutely vain and worthless.

Yet there is a wild story that he actually discovered the 'magisterium,' and was thereby enabled to send a gift of £100,000 to the Knights of St. John, to assist them in their defence of Rhodes against the Turks.

* * * * *

Thomas Norton, of Bristol, was the author of 'The Ordinall of Alchemy' (printed in London in 1652). He is said to have been a pupil of Ripley, under whom (at the age of 28) he studied for forty days, and in that short time acquired a thorough knowledge of 'the perfection of chemistry.' Ripley, however, refused to instruct so young a man in the master-secret of the great science, and the process from 'the white' to 'the red powder,' so that Norton was compelled to rely on his own skill and industry. Twice in his labours a sad disappointment overtook him. On one occasion he had almost completed the tincture, when the servant whom he employed to look after the furnace decamped with it, supposing that it was fit for use. On another it was stolen by the wife of William Canning, Mayor of Bristol, who immediately sprang into immense wealth, and as some amends, I suppose, for his ill-gotten gains, built the beautiful steeple of the church of St. Mary, Redcliffe--the church afterwards connected with the sad story of Chatterton. As for Norton, he seems to have lived in poverty and died in poverty (1477).

The 'Ordinall of Alchemy' is a tedious panegyric of the science, interspersed with a good deal of the vague talk about white and red stones and the philosophical magnesia in which 'the adepts' delighted.

* * * * *

To Norton we owe our scanty knowledge of Thomas Dalton, who flourished about the middle of the fifteenth century. He had the reputation of being a devout Churchman until he was accused by a certain Debois of possessing the powder of projection. Debois roundly asserted that Norton had made him a thousand pounds of gold (lucky man!) in less than twelve hours. Whereupon Dalton simply said, 'Sir, you are forsworn.' His explanation was that he had received the powder from a canon of Lichfield, on undertaking not to use it until after the canon's death; and that since he had been so troubled by his possession of it, that he had secretly destroyed it. One Thomas Herbert, a squire of King Edward, waylaid the unfortunate man, and shut him up in the castle of Gloucester, putting heavy pressure upon him to make the coveted tincture. But this Dalton would not and could not do; and after a captivity of four years, Herbert ordered him to be brought out and executed in his presence. He obeyed the harsh summons with great delight, exclaiming, 'Blessed art Thou, Lord Jesus! I have been too long absent from Thee. The science Thou gavest me I have kept without ever abusing it; I have found no one fit to be my heir; wherefore, sweet Lord, I will restore Thy gift to Thee again.'

'Then, after some devout prayer, with a smiling countenance he desired the executioner to proceed. Tears gushed from the eyes of Herbert when he beheld him so willing to die, and saw that no ingenuity could wrest his secret from him. He gave orders for his release. His imprisonment and threatened execution were contrived without the King's knowledge to intimidate him into compliance. The iniquitous devices having failed, Herbert did not dare to take away his life. Dalton rose from the block with a heavy countenance, and returned to his abbey, much grieved at the further prolongation of his earthly sojourn. Herbert died shortly after this atrocious act of tyranny, and Debois also came to an untimely end. His father, Sir John Debois, was slain at the battle of Tewkesbury, May 4, 1471; and two days after, as recorded in Stow's "Annales," he himself (James Debois) was taken, with several others of the Lancastrian party, from a church where they had fled for sanctuary, and was beheaded on the spot.'

FOOTNOTES:

[6] That is, costard, or apple, mongers.

[7] See Appendix to the present chapter, p. 58.

[8] The pentageron, or pentagramma, is a mystic figure produced by prolonging the sides of a regular pentagon till they intersect one another. It can be drawn without a break in the drawing, and, viewed from five sides, exhibits the form of the letter A (pent-alpha), or the figure of the fifth proposition in Euclid's First Book.

[9] From the Greek +phobos+, fear; +phobêtra+, bugbears.

[10] Bad puns were evidently common on the stage before the days of Victorian burlesque.

[11] So Shakespeare, '1 Hen. IV.,' iii. Falstaff says: 'I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death's head, or a memento house.'

[12] So in the 'Passionate Pilgrim':

'Save the nightingale alone: She, poor bird, as all forlorn, Leaned her breast uptill a thorn.'

[13] A _peripatetic_, or walking philosopher. Observe the facetiousness in 'Aristotle's _stamp_.' Aristotle was the founder of the Peripatetics.

[14] Fabius _Cunctator_, or the Delayer, so called from the policy of delay which he opposed to the vigorous movements of Hannibal. One would suppose that the humour here, such as it is, would hardly be perceptible to a theatrical audience.

[15] In the old German 'Faustbuch,' the title of 'Prince of the North' is given to Beelzebub.

[16] _Demogorgon_, or _Demiourgos_--the creative principle of evil--figures largely in literature. He is first mentioned by Lactantius, in the fourth century; then by Boccaccio, Boiardo, Tasso ('Gierusalemme Liberata'), and Ariosto ('Orlando Furioso'). Marlowe speaks, in 'Tamburlaine,' of 'Gorgon, prince of Hell.' Spenser, in 'The Faery Queen,' refers to--

'Great Gorgon, prince of darkness and dead night, At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight.'

Milton, in 'Paradise Lost,' alludes to 'the dreaded name of Demogorgon.' Dryden says: 'When the moon arises, and Demogorgon walks his round.' And he is one of the _dramatis personæ_ of Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound': 'Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom.... A mighty Darkness, filling the seat of power.'

[17] Boasts. So in Peele's 'Edward I': 'As thou to England brought'st thy Scottish braves.'

[18] This reiteration of the same final word, for the sake of emphasis, is found in Shakespeare.

[19] A corner or college cap.

[20] An allusion to the old legend that Brut, or Brutus, great-grandson of Æneas, founded New Troy (Troynovant), or London.

[21] Probably the reference is to the sunflower.

[22] The classic writers usually identify the hyacinth with Apollo.

[23] The rose, that is, of the Virgin Queen--an English Diana--Elizabeth. In Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (Act iv., scene 1) we read of 'Diana's bud.'

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I.

The ancient magic included various kinds of divination, of which the principal may here be catalogued:

_Aeromancy_, or divination from the air. If the wind blew from the east, it signified good fortune (which is certainly not the general opinion!); from the west, evil; from the south, calamity; from the north, disclosure of what was secret; from all quarters simultaneously (!), hail and rain.

_Axinomancy_, practised by the Greeks, more particularly for the purpose of discovering criminals. An axe poised upon a stake, or an agate on a red-hot axe, was supposed by its movement to indicate the offender. Or the names of suspected persons were called out, and the movement of the axe at a particular name was understood to certify guilt.

_Belomancy_, in use among the Arabs, was practised by means of arrows, which were shot off, with written labels attached to them; and the inscription on the arrow first picked up was accepted as prophetic.

_Bibliomancy_, divining by means of the Bible, survived to a comparatively recent period. The passage which first caught the eye, on a Bible being opened haphazard, was supposed to indicate the future. This was identical with the _Sortes Virgilianæ_, the only difference being that in the latter, Virgil took the place of the Bible. Everybody knows in connection with the Sortes the story of Charles I. and Lord Falkland.

_Botanomancy_, divining by means of plants and flowers, can hardly be said to be extinct even now. In Goethe's 'Faust,' Gretchen seeks to discover whether Faust returns her affection by plucking, one after another, the petals of a star-flower (_sternblume_, perhaps the china-aster), while she utters the alternate refrains, 'He loves me!' 'He loves me not!' as she plucks the last petal, exclaiming rapturously, 'He loves me!' According to Theocritus, the Greeks used the poppy-flower for this purpose.

_Capnomancy_, divination by smoke, the ancients practised in two ways: they threw seeds of jasmine or poppy in the fire, watching the motion and density of the smoke they emitted, or they observed the sacrificial smoke. If the smoke was thin, and shot up in a straight line, it was a good omen.

_Cheiromancy_ (or Palmistry), divination by the hand, was worked up into an elaborate system by Paracelsus, Cardan, and others. It has long been practised by the gipsies, by itinerant fortune-tellers, and other cheats; and recently an attempt has been made to give it a fashionable character.

_Coscinomancy_ was practised by means of a sieve and a pair of shears or forceps. The forceps or shears were used to suspend a sieve, which moved (like the axe in axinomancy) when the name of a guilty person was mentioned.

_Crystallomancy_, divining by means of a crystal globe, mirror, or beryl. Of this science of prediction, Dr. Dee was the great English professor; but the reader will doubtless remember the story of the Earl of Surrey and his fair 'Geraldine.'

_Geomancy_, divination by casting pebbles on the ground.

_Hydromancy_, divination by water, in which the diviner showed the figure of an absent person. 'In this you conjure the spirits into water; there they are constrained to show themselves, as Marcus Varro testifieth, when he writeth how he had seen a boy in the water, who announced to him in a hundred and fifty verses the end of the Mithridatic war.'

_Oneiromancy_, divination by dreams, is still credited by old women of both sexes. Absurdly baseless as it is, it found believers in the old time among men of culture and intellectual force. Archbishop Laud attached so much importance to his dreams that he frequently recorded them in his diary; and even Lord Bacon seems to have thought that a prophetic meaning was occasionally concealed in them.

_Onychomancy_, or _Onymancy_, divination by means of the nails of an unpolluted boy.

_Pyromancy_, divination by fire. 'The wife of Cicero is said, when, after performing sacrifice, she saw a flame suddenly leap forth from the ashes, to have prophesied the consulship to her husband for the same year.' Others resorted to the blaze of a torch of pitch, which was painted with certain colours. It was a good omen if the flame ran into a point; bad when it divided. A thin-tongued flame announced glory; if it went out, it signified danger; if it hissed, misfortune.

_Rabdomancy_, divination by the rod or wand, is mentioned by Ezekiel. The use of a hazel-rod to trace the existence of water or of a seam of coal seems a survival of this practice. But enough of these follies:

'Necro-, pyro-, geo-, hydro-, cheiro-, coscinomancy, With other vain and superstitious sciences.' Tomkis, 'Albumazar,' ii. 3.