Witch, Warlock, and Magician Part 4

BACON. As how?

MILES. Marry, sir, the first time he said, 'Time is,' as if Fabius Commentator[14] should have p.r.o.nounced a sentence; then he said, 'Time was;' and the third time, with thunder and lightning, as in great choler, he said, 'Time is past.'

BACON. 'Tis past, indeed. Ah, villain! Time is past; My life, my fame, my glory, are all past.

Bacon, The turrets of thy hope are ruined down, Thy seven years' study lieth in the dust: Thy Brazen Head lies broken through a slave That watched, and would not when the Head did will.

What said the Head first?

MILES. Even, sir, 'Time is.'

BACON. Villain, if thou hadst called to Bacon then, If thou hadst watched, and waked the sleepy friar, The Brazen Head had uttered aphorisms, And England had been circled round with bra.s.s: But proud Asmenoth,[15] ruler of the North, And Demogorgon,[16] master of the Fates, Grudge that a mortal man should work so much.

h.e.l.l trembled at my deep-commanding spells, Fiends frowned to see a man their over-match; Bacon might boast more than a man might boast; But now the braves[17] of Bacon have an end, Europe's conceit of Bacon hath an end, His seven years' practice sorteth to ill end: And, villain, sith my glory hath an end, I will appoint thee to some fatal end.[18]

Villain, avoid! get thee from Bacon's sight!

Vagrant, go, roam and range about the world, And perish as a vagabond on earth!

MILES. Why, then, sir, you forbid me your service?

BACON. My service, villain, with a fatal curse, That direful plagues and mischief fall on thee.

MILES. 'Tis no matter, I am against you with the old proverb, 'The more the fox is cursed, the better he fares.' G.o.d be with you, sir: I'll take but a book in my hand, a wide-sleeved gown on my back, and a crowned cap[19] on my head, and see if I can merit promotion.

BACON. Some fiend or ghost haunt on thy weary steps, Until they do transport thee quick to h.e.l.l!

For Bacon shall have never any day, To lose the fame and honour of his Head.

[_Exeunt._

Scene XII. pa.s.ses 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 'gla.s.s 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 Phbus' 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 a.s.sist 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 a.s.serted 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 f???, fear; f??t?a, 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 'Pa.s.sionate 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 t.i.tle 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, Ta.s.so ('Gierusalemme Liberata'), and Ariosto ('Orlando Furioso'). Marlowe speaks, in 'Tamburlaine,' of 'Gorgon, prince of h.e.l.l.' 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 personae_ of Sh.e.l.ley'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.