We have taken a cheap estimate of
him from Fuller and Bacon, and from a host of scurrilous scribblers
who debased or perverted his writings. Fuller(4) picked him out as
exemplifying the drunken quack, whose body was a sea wherein the tide
of drunkenness was ever ebbing and flowing--"He boasted that shortly
he would order Luther and the Pope, as well as he had done Galen and
Hippocrates. He was never seen to pray, and seldome came to Church.
He was not onely skilled in naturall Magick (the utmost bounds whereof
border on the suburbs of hell) but is charged to converse constantly
with familiars. Guilty he was of all vices but wantonnesse: . . . "
(4) Fuller: The Holy and Profane State, Cambridge, 1642, p. 56.
Francis Bacon, too, says many hard things of him.(5)
(5) Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Bk.
II, Pickering ed., London, 1840, p. 181. Works, Spedding ed.,
III, 381.
To the mystics, on the other hand, he is Paracelsus the Great, the
divine, the most supreme of the Christian magi, whose writings are too
precious for science, the monarch of secrets, who has discovered the
Universal Medicine. This is illustrated in Browning's well-known poem
"Paracelsus," published when he was only twenty-one; than which there
is no more pleasant picture in literature of the man and of his
aspirations.
Pages:
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195